New authoring platform - Evergreen.ink (Looking for feedback!)

(Hopefully this is ok to post here. If not, please let me know and I will repost in the correct place.)
Anyway, our new platform is called Evergreen.ink and we are doing a limited alpha right now to get feedback and iron out bugs. The focus of the platform is on ease of writing and an emphasis on a mobile reading experience. If anyone is interested, here’s the signup and a few codes. Would love feedback.

Thanks in advance!

-Jon

The tool is located at evergreen.ink

Codes:
eWjbCK44wUWFJGWTigdtkw
eWjbCK44TUeA4BCbIt3hyA
eWjbCK44j0eHub869obkEQ
eWjbCK44qUeO3rJWW6PfMA
eWjbCK4400eC2ZQSEw1pqA

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Here are extra codes if anyone needs one:
tmjbCKgi-02ACHvpOQDUpg
tmjbCMQi00KCqI4vUVKmbw
tmjbCMQiu0OH_eCUPaWk5A

@cheesemaker - I like it, it’s very user-friendly, the preview display is helpful. What I think would really elevate it is adding variables, booleans, and/or stats that can be triggered, set, incremented, etc. when certain options are chosen. Let me know if that doesn’t make sense and I’ll think of an example for you.

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Looks simple and solid so far. I wish there was a way to play the game “full out” as a player. I could only work with the preview on the right which seems to show all choices even if they’re gated by an “if visited card” option.

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If you click on the Share button for the story, you can paste the URL into a browser window and play it as a player would. If you make changes to the story, you just need to hit refresh on the browser window to pick up the changes. Let me know if that doesn’t make sense or if you have any trouble.

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Thank you for the feedback. I really appreciate it. The whole engine actually has the ability to have variables and every element has a scriptable element to it; we’ve just been very slow/hesitant to expose the controls for those because we want to maintain the user-friendly aspect of it. But I hear what you are saying and we will try to more actively explore exposing those to authors.

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Cool!

I can understand that. Maybe an “advanced editing” mode?

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Yeah, that’s definitely the path we are leaning towards. The tool is actively being developed so hopefully we can have something to try next week. Again, thank you for the feedback.

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Looking forward to it.

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I just always worry about sharing or publishing a test. Does that just give a shareable URL? I don’t want my crappy apartment test thing to be publicized!

Also you have images. Any potential future support for sound or music?

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Understood. So, yes it generates a shareable link but it is only available to you to share if you want. That being said, we understand the potential confusion and are adding a “play” button that you can use to directly take you to the story experience without the shareable link.

As for music, yes. We plan to support both sound effects and a “background” track that can be changed per card. However, we are focusing on the text/visuals first. Looking at our backlog, it will probably be about a month before we are able to get to audio support.

Also, thank you for the feedback!

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Cool: there are some other systems where “publish” lists the game publicly to a browsable catalog. I like this option a lot better.

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Just a follow-up that today we deployed a number of improvements, including adding a “Play” button so you can go directly into the viewer from the authoring tool.

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Hello! We just released the initial tools for adding scripting to stories in Evergreen. By default, they’re hidden, but you can turn them on by toggling between Basic/Advanced mode in the Card editor. We’re still working on getting documentation created, but will be adding documentation (and of course we are always over on the Discord site to help as well). If you get a chance to check it out, would love to hear feedback.

Thanks!

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Awesome! I’ll check it out this evening!