Has anyone ever dabbled with the Hoot tool for IF?
Repo here.
Just wondered if anyone has ever developed a game with it.
Has anyone ever dabbled with the Hoot tool for IF?
Repo here.
Just wondered if anyone has ever developed a game with it.
Interesting. Placed Hoot (and that still-in-progess evolution, Hiss) in if/eng/tst, between the ST work (playing & reviewing) I’ll give a look, comparising them with other tool (at first look, are very simple & not requiring many resources, perhaps enough for simple, quick work, or for proof-of concept, or perhaps even have the potential for being a reasonably valid alternative to twine-chapbook ? )
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’ve emailed with Dave, the guy who wrote Hoot. He’d not actively developed it for a long time, but was happy to throw it up on a repo for anyone who wants to play with it. I’ve not spent any time with it, but my sense is that it might appeal to some people.
Found time to fool around these two CYOA IF dev languages; Hoot shows its age, and has many rough spots (for example, for changing the title one must edit at the very end of the .htm file, and seems that the links is of fixed colour, blue (forcing myself to abandon my yellow-on-blue standard test palette because the links become near-invisible…) but I manage to build a good test IF, so I say that is very easy to use, albeit I suspect is good, if not excellent for very short stories, let’s say, 25-35 passages, if one kept its complexity well within its practical limits.
Hiss is basically on par with twine-chapbook, minus the styling, but with a nifty WYSIWYG palette handling in which is even spelled the variable names holding the colours. A good thing for people with limited knowledge of .css, I guess. but its best feature is the really compact story file, 14k for a eight-passage story with short, ~256 char each, text. (for a three-passage, without much text (a trio of themes) Chapbook generates ~140k story files…) and this is an excellent feature. Another feature which IMVHO must be ported to Twine (all story formats) is the deco scripting, which allows a relatively easy creation of ornamental designs, and I don’t hide that I’m really impressed by this feature, which allow gorgeous-looking story files.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Oh wow! Hiss does look impressive. Love the deco:
deco: o<<==[.o][<<O*=|][.o]<<==o
This is way cool!
Thanks for investigating, Piergiorgio!
This is beautiful.
I would like a Twine format for HISS/deco.