Storying index page

Hello all,

I’m currently looking at improving the storying index page to provide more information at a glance. At the moment, it just displays name, image and order number for each entry. I’m keen to make sure that we don’t make each entry so long that the list becomes unnavigable, but I feel that a bit more information would certainly be beneficial.

I’d be interested to know how useful you would find displaying the following information on the storylet index would be:

  • Name (already present, will not be removed)[/li][li]Image (already present, will not be removed)[/li][li]Description preview (short snippet of root event description)[/li][li]Number of branches[/li][li]Setting storylet belongs in[/li][li]Area storylet belongs in (if any)[/li][li]Order (already present, will not be removed)

Also, I’d be interested to know if you feel like there is any other additional information that it would be useful to have at a glance on this page. As I say, I don’t want to put an overwhelming amount of information up there at a glance and I don’t want to increase page load times, so certain data might just not be practical, but I would like to know if there is any info you feel you need to know about a storylet fairly consistently when editing.

Cheers people!

Liam

This is also madness, but what about a screen where we could experimentally set up a list of qualities and an area and setting, and the ui would show every card a player with those qualities had access to?

On a more realistic scale…just being able to group or filter cards by deck, setting, and area would be awesome.

Were I allowed to start with a clean sheet of paper, what I’d really like is a richer tagging system:

[ul][li]the ability to define several different tags (“storyline”, “draft?”, that kind of thing)[/li][li]and to restrict their values to a pre-defined set (to avoid typos).[/li][/ul]That would allow me to organise the storylets in a way which makes sense to me, rather than being forced into anyone else’s vision of how I “ought” to work.

But I’m probably not allowed to start with a clean sheet of paper, so… yes, like Hanon said: area, setting and deck. And tag! You haven’t mentioned tag in your list - surely an oversight :-)

Cheers
Richard

Or if we could have an extra layer of tag like

Candy Kingdom.king
Candy Kingdom.queen
Candy Kingdom.endgame

Where that would give us another tree layer under each tag.

[color=#009900]Folks[/color]
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[color=#009900]There are lots of good ideas here, and do feel free to paste them into the suggestions thread. But this is a quick tidy-up job, so we really are talking about simple snippets of extra info, not restructuring.[/color]
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[color=#009900](Tag values are in - they’ll remain concertinas for now.)[/color]

OK, I’d jumped ahead somewhat, and assumed we were at least talking about sortable columns.

If what we’re actually discussing is still one big list in a (relatively) arbitrary order, then I’m still going to have to work around that by encoding information in tags - and it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to have essentially the same information presented to me again. So my preference in this case is to keep things as succinct as possible. Others may differ, of course.

Cheers
Richard

[eyebrows down] IN con-trooll…

Oh and Richard…my method of dealing with typos in tags is to press the first letter of my tag then select from the drop-down. I’m unsure if this is a browser function or a storynexus function.

Oh, that’s a very good point… it’s a browser function. I normally use Safari, which does something different and rather less helpful, but this might be enough to persuade me to try a different one. Thanks for the tip.

Funny - I use safari and get the drop down. Perhaps it’s a preference…autocomplete?

I believe that is a browser-specific think HanonO, though we will be introducing in-engine autocompletes for tags for exactly this reason.

I’d love to see either the qualities required for the storylet, the notes field, or both. I’m setting up a string of storylets for character create, for example. They all have the tag Character Create which means they sort nicely into a category on the Storying index page. It’s hard for me to keep straight on the Storying index page which is step 1, step 2, etc. because all of the text is in context. Basically I would have to remember that the card with “Stop… Think!” is step 1, and “Assess Your Options” is step 2. If the qualities required were listed, I would see that “Stop… Think” requires A Stranger at 1 while “Assess Your Options” requires A Stranger at 2. Alternatively, I could set the notes to tell me which is step 1 and which is step 2. If I try to do this with the tags, I end up with each storylet in a separate, folding category listing (which seems to defeat the purpose of displaying the tags that way).

I’m still new to StoryNexus, so maybe there’s another way to accomplish better sequential storylet tracking?

If it’s a series of Must cards which are only ever displayed as part of this sequence, then you could always put numbers in the Order box. It’s a subversion of what Order is actually for - but it won’t have any visible effect to players, and it will make the storylets display in your desired order in the creator interface.

Cheers
Richard

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[color=#009900]I think the notes field should go in there - I’ll talk to Liam. (It does appear in the recently-edited-storylets on the RHS, but that’s not the same). +1 to Richard’s Order suggestion.[/color]
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[color=#009900]Qualities required… we’d like to provide quicker and better quality-based-view-slicing, but that’s waiting on some caching and performance improvements. In the meantime the search by quality required at the top right can be really helpful.[/color]

The notes field would be a big help. Huge even.

Also, maybe some indication (color coding?) of cards that are blocked by Impossible or Key of Dreams, since those are special?