Alright, so as I’m sure everyone who frequents this site is aware, Chronicler is a brilliant tool created by @BenSeawalker to help those who don’t have the time for/find difficulty learning “manual ChoicesScript”. I seem to be one of those people.
Now, I don’t mean to seem disrespectful - but is it actually a feasible way to create a game?
I’m aware that it would likely take much longer altogether to constantly be screwing around with bubbles etc rather than simply learning ChoiceScript and “speeding through”, but is the code any different from what someone would write manually? Were you to theoretically leave your Chronicler made game code untouched and send it to CoG - would it be allowed? Has anyone actually done this yet?
Apologies if I made a mistake regarding the topic - it’s my first time posting though I’d lurked for a couple years before creating an account a few months back.
No worries, Chronicler is definitely a viable way to create a game!
In my opinion the code isn’t at all different than what someone would write manually. I’m familiar with coding in other things (C#, Python, and Objective-C) so I use it to give me a strong base code and then manually go in to change things when I need a more complex feature. I highly recommend using Chronicler, since it makes things much faster and you can focus more on the story itself. To me, the bubbles keeps it more organized. When looking at pure code it’s easier to ‘go crosseyed’. When I use Chronicler I’m a lot less likely to make that one tiny mistake that completely breaks the game.
Since ,I’m working on my first game, I can’t answer your question on leaving the code untouched and sending it to CoG. Sorry.
Hello @MisterFahrenheit those are good questions and not disrespectful in the least.
I agree that dragging in bubbles and connecting them can become tedious, hence why the new version of Chronicler coming out end of this year or early next year will not suffer from these issues.
The code generated by Chronicler attempts to produce code like a human would write. In most cases it is more efficient as it doesn’t duplicate code, anything that has more than one link to it is only generated once with a label rather than nested inside other blocks.
I might have to take that back, as in the last update I addressed some concerns by other users that resulted in it generating a label over everything rather than attempting to nest code.
Again, this is just the current version of Chronicler. I, in fact, recommend avoiding using it until the new version is released.
The new version will be swift and intuitive, and even support mobile devices so that you can work while on the go.
There won’t be manual placing of bubbles, instead the graph is generated for you. Bubbles will be replaced with “Nodes” that represent each page of your game, meaning they contain multiple ChoiceScript actions and text, ending in a “Next” button. See the mockup image mentioned in the Chronicler thread.
I myself don’t actually do much CS writing, even though that’s what I started working on Chronicler for to start with. >_<
When I first started writing interactive fiction, I was doing it the old school way. Labels were numbered and there were no nestled choices. I would say it was more difficult than coding. Tabs sometimes give people a hard time, especially with heavy nestling, so I guess they are not recommended anyway.
I use a limited number of commands, probably the bare minimum.
