I quite like the Twinery web editor for building hypertext adventures. But from what I understand there are better editors now.
Is there a tool that I could use to build a quick map or story with some links, that I can easily extract a JSON output file from? Kind of like using a twine editor as a map editor. I want to use the final data in my own engine.
Last time I looked the code and data weren’t separated very cleanly, it was generating HTML pages or something internally.
I’m not sure about JSON, but this site offers a lot of story format and proofing formats. http://mcdemarco.net/tools/hyperfic/twine/
Some of the proofing formats might do what you want. For example, there’s one that outputs graphviz formatted data that should be easily parsable.
I know at least two story formats that generate a JSON file instead of HTML.
They are pretty old, though. Also, I have near to zero experience with Twine and haven’t used any of the story formats above, so I can’t help more than that.
For a map editor other than Twine, there’s Trizbort that can export to PDF, PNG, JPG, Inform 6, Inform 7 or TADS code, but not JSON.