I’m twiddling around with a project that has many, many branches. I’m having trouble mapping those choices so that I can visualize them, implement all of them, check them off, and make sure they all work. I can’t do it on paper adequately.
Does anyone have any strategies or tools they use to organize many branches? I’m at the point of taping ten sheets of paper together and just doing a giant tree, but I’m hoping someone has a better idea.
I use Excel to draw boxes and arrows between the elements. This helps me.
Hi Amanda,
I find the local version of Trizbort invaluable. It is the best mapping software I have found.
I have the same issue, because I needed a “wiki-like” approach for contextualising the in-story lore, so I decided to do first the story, then the “wikilinks” whose WILL turn twine’s visual layout into an hopeless spaghetti of arrows.
Yeah, this describes my problem perfectly. I spend more time untangling spaghetti than I do writing.
Twine.
It’s designed for branching narrative, and even if you’re not using it it can be used to chart story flow. True there is the “spaghetti of arrows” problem but you can organize as neatly or as twisted as you want.
One of the cool things is if you type a choice/outcome inside [[square brackets]] it will create that next node automatically. And you can basically then step through each possible path by test playing clicking through.
If not Twine, than basically any free online flowchart app can do the same.
The other great thing about using Twine is that if things get too tangled you can easily drag them to spread them out, without any copy/pasting hassle.
A tool I’ve used successfully many times is Graphviz. It’s more technical, but does auto-layout with tons of options, and there’s a huge ecosystem of tools, not to mention a vast community.
I like Miro which has a bunch of flowchart-related features.
I use Twine too, whether or not I’m writing in Twine, just because it’s easy to create nodes that are labeled in a way that makes sense and move them around. It feels more intuitive than other branch-mapping tools I’ve tried.
If I have a game flow that depends a lot on items or puzzle solving, I also like using Puzzlon, though it’s a little more fiddly (I end up having to fix my own code mistakes a lot).
Another vote for using Twine even for non-Twine games. Among other things I used it to plan out which planets you’d learn about in what order for Superluminal Vagrant Twin.
I use the free version of Miro, and I find it helps a lot!
