Years ago I built an IF game as a custom app, along with a pretty barebones tool to author it. I couldn’t shake the idea of turning that authoring tool into something genuinely usable, so earlier this year I sat down and built it properly. It’s now ready for public release.
*As You Write* is a local-first desktop tool for building branching, stat-driven interactive fiction. It handles choice-based branching, stat and variable systems, dice mechanics (d20 rolls with modifiers and advantage/disadvantage), and live preview on your actual device as you write. If you’ve used Twine or ChoiceScript and wanted something with a more visual, app-like authoring flow, that’s roughly the itch I was scratching.
I’d really appreciate it if a few of you gave it a try. I’m especially keen to hear: does the branching model make sense to you, and is there anything that felt clunky or missing coming from the tools you already use? Bug reports very welcome too. I’m actively adding features, so this is a good moment to shape where it goes.
Please be gentle though. It’s just me, one person who’s genuinely passionate about this, putting something out there.
Spent a little time in it over the weekend and it looks promising so far! If you ask me it does pretty much what you set out to do: it makes IF more approachable and intuitive to beginners.
I’m not exactly the target audience, being someone who (to a degree) enjoys coding and isn’t very visual to begin with, but I can definitely see the appeal of the visual interface and the flowchart mechanism and so on. Being able to view the game as it would appear on mobile is I would be happy recommending this to someone who wants to write but not code.
I’m a little in love with it on an aesthetic level. It’s so clean and professional, and the brand is subtle but present. I’d love to work in it more, especially since I’d actually get to own my own story (working in ChoiceScript mostly these days, and I hate not being able to do what I want with it), but unfortunately it just doesn’t mesh quite well enough with my workflow and the stories I want to tell.
You asked about missing features, well here is what would prevent me from moving from CS to AYW (keeping in mind that, once again, I’m not the target audience here and these might not be dealbreakers for your main customer):
limited if/else statements (I’d like to be able to do a list of if/elseif/else and not just two)
limited ways of manipulating variables (I didn’t see an option to, for example, multiply a variable by a percentage)
no opposite stat functionality (I love in CS being able to do stats like evil/good on a spectrum)
limited stats screen functionality, with no real way to include/edit a menu or anything like that from what I’ve seen
no way to ctrl-f for more text than a small scene
nothing like CS’s *gosub or multipreplace commands from what I saw
no community…Twine (Discord) and CS (forums, reddit) both have such active communities, a way for authors to connect and help each other out and share work, but I didn’t see any way to so much as follow a social media page for AYW
no coding (okay I know this is kinda the whole point, but I just personally find it clunky doing all the point and click stuff, especially coming from CS which has such quick and elegant coding…I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, but I’d love it if I could toggle on this ability)
There also seems to be a bug where I couldn’t click “create” until I filled out the fields for both a linear and nonlinear story (using Ubuntu).
Nice work overall, I look forward to seeing where this goes!
i looked at this tool briefly and bashed together a few test scenes; The presentation is nice and clean, also i found no bugs.
If this is a commercial product, i think it might suffer from being “in the middle”. I’ll explain.
On one side, what I’d really like is a design tool for IF, rather than something that actually builds games. For anyone already invested in a system, it’s not particularly useful that such a product builds a runnable game. Mock-ups and prototyping would be one use that comes to mind. But if the game logic of your system differs significantly from that of the target system, that’s not especially useful.
on the other side, a full-on game maker tool is something that would have to build and deploy games into various targets, not just the web. And of course, graphics would be essential. It would also need customisable presentation, branding etc. This would be aimed at authors wishing to put their games on app stores etc.
Anyway, I’m not knocking your system because i think it looks really good. Although, there have been several systems recently vying for the same space, and something either tangential or orthogonal would, i think, stand a better chance.
I would be happy recommending this to someone who wants to write but not code.