ISO recommended choice planning tool

Authoring Dialog
4

I think maybe I made this too difficult by saying too much. If I rephrase my question more naively, as “I would like to find a visual tool to help choice-based story planning now. I would want to choose my code/publishing platform at some hazy future date*,” does that change anybody’s answer?

For instance, Storyboard almost fits the bill. It’s easy to use and although it doesn’t deal with simultaneous collaboration it’s fine for a “your turn now, okay click save, okay I’ll refresh, okay good” back-and-forth. The main two problems for my workflow show up in this test story:

  1. You can’t see all of the text from the GUI view. You have to click on each story node (“scene”) individually to see the full node text and choice options.
  2. The .json export is too database-y to be nicely human-readable for later coding, and that’s the only export option.

And trizbort.io is actually a little nicer than I would have thought it would be. It’s not purpose-built for this, but unlike Storyboard it’s pretty easy to get all of the node and choice text on the screen:

upholstered_trizbort
upholstered_trizbort676×708 11.3 KB

This is not terrible! The TADS code export is even pretty human-readable, but it omits the choice text which is a major downer.

Phonerings: Room '#phonerings'
  "Moneypenny answers the phone. It is an OFFICIAL with an IMPORTNAT PROBLEM"
  northeast: NotifyM 
  eastnortheast: Solveyourself 
  southeast: Admiredoors 
;


NotifyM: Room '#notifyM'
  "lorem ipsum"
  west: Phonerings 
;

Aside from losing the choice text, I’d be totally satisfied fixing the rest of the dumb stuff by hand. Maybe that’s a feature request…

@dfabulich - I understand that there is no Dialog aware/sensitive/compatible nodey-pathy-planny tool. Let’s say that my aversion to writing logic twice is at worst a “care some about.” But let’s also say that I’m fine with just naming an always-true choice “ONLY IF HAVE REPELLENT AND MET SEALS AND BEFRIENDED SEALS - Go swimming with your shark repellent and new seal friends” in the mapper and dealing with it later.

Your point about using a repo to make it easier to collaborate during the mapping phase is well taken.

@Oreolek - Thanks for the pointers to the general-purpose whiteboards, those may be interesting options as well.

* - but it's gonna be dialog, shhh don't tell anybody

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