I’m a current Twine2 user who has been frustrated by attempts at collaborative writing and editing of my stories with my editors/friends (mainly my long-distance Beautiful Girlfriend). I like to make choice-based games over parser ones, though if a parser engine would also work for choices, I’m still interested.
I’m looking for recommendations on engines or engine ‘hacks’ that will allow us to look at and edit the same files around the same time.
Here’s my current ideas/understanding so you know my technical skill level:
Gitlab/github with an IDE like VSCode to edit either Twee, Narrat, or something similar. The problem with this option is that my Beautiful Girlfriend isn’t very git-savvy and I prefer to front load all the technical set up onto myself and make it easier for her, and our less tech literate friends, to help edit.
Dedicated VM to host the development engine on that we can both log into. I think the feasibility of us working on the same application at the same time depends on the set up of the app/engine itself, so recs would be appreciated here.
A techie friend suggested a linux VM with tmux as the terminal manager so that we can both be in the files and editing at the same time. I’m not sure if I can get tmux to work with an IDE or anything graphical though. (Linux noob).
Just straight up paying for the higher tier of Arcweave. While I don’t like the idea of losing access to my projects if I decide to stop paying the monthly subscription, it does claim to have the functionality I want and the cloud-based storage lends itself to collaborative writing. So if anyone has tried it or has thoughts, please let me know.
Please let me know your thoughts! The goal is to make the editing and collaboration process as seamless as can be for my editors and co-writers, but I’m willing to learn whatever technical skills it takes to pull this off.
I remember the Github + VSCode situation being a little bit of a pain to set up but once you have it in place it’s just “push button to send/receive changes” so I think your girlfriend would be fine as long as you could walk her through setting it up (speaking as someone who uses that combo, knew sweet fuck all about Git going in, and still barely knows anything about Git to this day).
I definitely do not recommend a CLI-based Linux VM if she is not tech-savvy.
piggybacking off @ejoyce, I’ve just checked the postmortem for the second lady thalia game (at least I think it’s the second), and @encorm brought up an article on how to use vscode+github for collaborative projects
if you don’t mind learning a new story format, from memory, @smwhr has created a dendry starter pack that claims to let you edit the source files directly from the browser. Full disclaimer though, I haven’t actually used the starter pack myself.
Back when I looked at Arcweave, there was no way to export your game as an HTML file. All the Arcweave stories are hosted on the Arcweave site itself, as far as I’m aware, and can’t be archived, which means they’ll be lost forever if Arcweave goes down. Also, the lack of ability to export your game as HTML may make it difficult to submit it to this community’s events, like Spring Thing or IFComp. I’ve never used the collaboration feature, so I don’t know how that works, but the lack of export is something to be aware of.
I can’t give the recommendation quite yet, but I have been building my writing tool ChronicleHub with collaboration in mind. Users are already able to invite others to work on the same story as them, but I haven’t gotten simultaneous editing functional yet. Beyond just that, there is still a lot to add, and I’m actively developing it, so if there are any collaborative features you would appreciate in a tool, please let me know!
Another Git-like environment is Gitea. Your concerns about git probably apply there too. However they have an article on use in game development which acknowledges the difficulties encountered by artists (assuming them to be non-techy). They integrate with a git client called Anchorpoint, which I’m entirely ignorant of.
Possibly very overkill for your project, but it might help you navigate the issues, since they seem to be those faced by others too.
I know this is a bit late, but the authoring platform I built, storyfall.com supports teams. You can write choice-based games with it.
You simply create a story and then invite collaborators. They can then see everything you see. If they make changes, you just have to refresh the page and you’ll see the changes too.
Let me know if you want to chat about anything - I’m happy to help with any questions!