Proposed Twine Revamp

LucienLachance

So keep in mind I ain't no developer or designer, but there's some usability issues with Twine that have always bugged me. I've made a mockup of a version of Twine that would solve some of these issues. Let's take a look:



On the left side of the screen, there is a text editor with code folding and line numbering. Editing CSS in Twine is something of a nightmare. Rather than opening Atom or Notepad++, it would be far more convenient to have a text editor right there in Twine. In addition to tabs for HTML, CSS, and JS, there is also a tab labeled "Assets." It's not shown in this image, but the idea is that images, sounds, and fonts would be shown in a list in that sidebar rather than in the Story Map.

The Story Map is pretty much how it always was, just with Snap to Grid added as a button on top.

To the right of the Story Map is a Live Preview. Sometimes, when testing, I end up with a million Chrome tabs with different iterations of the story. Here, all changes show up immediately in the Live Preview window. You can select the aspect ratio to test out responsive design.

Below the Story Map is the Passage Editor. In addition to a WYSIWYG interface, the Passage Editor supports tabbed browsing, so you don't have to have a million windows open.

So yeah, these features are all super simple and easy to build, right? /s

XianXian

Um, can this be a thing, bc this is genius?

stray

This would be awesome. I'd happily pay for an upgrade like this. Especially if I could detach the Story Map so I could make it fullscreen on one monitor while editing on the other.

Aniki

That would be great indeed !

Deadshot

I wouldn't mind it unless I would have to re-learn any code. But currently I don't really see any problems with the current version.

Claretta

I like the current version as it lets me see the entire game at a glance with the large story area.

Also I don't want a native code editor because it doesn't solve the real problem with editing css in Twine. Once you get a very large game you get lag, so to fix this always need to write code in notepad++ and copy paste over to Twine anyway. This is an issue with Twine itself, not its layout.

Deadshot

Claretta wrote: »

I like the current version as it lets me see the entire game at a glance with the large story area.

Also I don't want a native code editor because it doesn't solve the real problem with editing css in Twine. Once you get a very large game you get lag, so to fix this always need to write code in notepad++ and copy paste over to Twine anyway. This is an issue with Twine itself, not its layout.

Agreed.

tyrok_wolfgaming

I think it looks cool and convenient but it may seem a bit advanced to new people.
I dont know thats just my opinion

Deadshot

I don't see how editing CSS is a nightmare. I find it quite easy. Just font, background colour and that kinda stuff init?

Claretta

Un-minified, my CSS is over 5,000 lines of code. The default editor isn't able to handle it. Extreme use case, but it can be a nightmare. Most is the image and animation code. I'm progressively moving it over to javascript animations to make it more efficient.

The other thing is it's always a good idea to minify CSS, so you'll ideally always doing some copy pasting.

Khaloodxp

some advice try to keep it simple, don't add major changes that font bar seems like a good idea, while of course you can write the codes for the fonts its way more efficient that way, rather than spending time writing the coding for fonts