This thread is for your suggestions for features or improvements to StoryNexus. Tell us what would help you out.
We’ve got a lot of big plans. So before suggesting something, you might want to have a look here to see if it’s on the roadmap already:
And if you like someone else’s suggestion, I’d recommend the thumbs up button. Let us know that something’s popular.
So, suggest away!
Thanks for the suggestion box Nigel!
I’d like a quality class that persists across characters for its world only.
(So: a Hungry Quality that persists across characters for a given account in Sandwich World, but isn’t usable in Zero Summer or Fallen London or &c.)
[color=#009900]EDIT: Now implemented! Though it still says ‘forthcoming’ in the help text. Tick the Persistent box on the quality-edit page to make it survive.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 11/25/2012
A little request - I would like Storylet notes to be displayed besides them in the Story list. In this way the author can, say, see what storylets are in Draft, Edit, or Ready. Or to communicate/remind what work needs doing on a storylet.
[color=#009900]Notes are actually displayed on the ‘recently edited storylets’ column on the RHS. We will be improving the Storylet view, though.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 11/25/2012
@Torrain: Any reason you’re doing that instead of switching areas between the intro and the rest of the game? I find that much quicker to set on a card.
That out of the way, I’d like to see some more options for filtering (or not filtering) the list of qualities. Like ‘show all’, ‘show all (this world only)’, ‘things (this world only)’, ‘status (this world only)’.
Most importantly, I think, can the quality filter stay set to whatever it was last set to, instead of always going back to ‘things’. It’s kind of a pain when I have to edit a stack of statuses. (Which keeps happening to me, because I’m trying to figure out what ‘appropriate design principles’ look like, in this context.)
As a player, rather then a creator, I would like a way to save player created worlds to my account. It would make checking up on new content easier.
From the previous suggestions thread, so we have stuff together:
triptych wrote:
I have a very basic / simple request. When you are editing a field for the first time and there are “…” in the field, can you select all of the text in that field when you click into it? Otherwise you have to click into it, select, delete, then start typing.
@The_Bard wrote:
Is it possible to have a ‘Save All’ feature. I tend to make multiple changes to multiple branches and then scrolling back to click on ‘Save’ on each thing that’s changed is very annoying.
Sounding off in full-throated support of ‘transient’ Sometimes cards, as per a recent post of Alexis’s.
[color=#009900]This is now implemented, as of the INSTRUMENT release.[/color]
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 11/8/2012
Have the style themes be editable. Have several arrangements of boxes of contents and be able to select which box style you want for each section from the given theme.
I would still like to be able to control handsizes, preferably by area. Also, something like the second chance items in FL.
Something that I feel is sorely lacking is the ability to branch text based on a quality, outside of making duplicate branches/storylets. Some sort of basic “If…Else” is something I’m finding hard to write dynamic stories without. I know what the obvious solutions are, but they feel like workarounds and it clutters up storylets, especially if I just want to change only a line or two in the flavor text. And without being able to hide qualities, I can’t set up qualities with varying flavor text as levels without (to my knowledge) showing the player those obscure snippets of story way out of context. If branching flavor text within a field can’t happen, conditional branches would work just as well. “Default Branch IF area = blahblah, Default Branch IF ‘Met the Barber’ > 1”. This may be a pipe dream or my head just hasn’t wrapped completely around the unique way StoryNexus works. It certainly is unlike any other story medium I’ve worked with before.
We really, really need a way to display a Quality’s level in its QCD.
We could also use a way to bold things in QCDs so they match up with the standard QCD (which bolds Quality names).
Hello Failbetter,
Is there any chance we could have a way for creators to dump out their StoryNexus games to XML, JSON or a similar format?
Similarly, any chance we could have an import from some format?
I’m off line for two hours a day during my commute. It’s a great opportunity for me to write stuff, but I can’t use that opportunity to write my StoryNexus game, since the tools require me to be on line.
Cheers, Jim
Story Nexus idea: Ninja Soap Opera
Nanowrimo participant
Suggestion: plug and play from Word. I do the first draft of most of my storylets on a legal pad, then copy them into Word (mostly for spellcheck), then dump them manually into storylet frames. It works swell as long as I keep track of which Qualities are being changed and required, and keep each Storylet separated out.
[color=#009900]sjjh: we’ve talked about this, but it’s a sufficiently big task and a sufficiently rare use-case that it’s not going to be on the roadmap any time soon - sorry. As Gordon says, c/p into and out of a text editor will take you a long way.[/color]
[color=#ff99ff]To add to that, what we often do is skeletonise cards in advance - that is, create all the branches with all the quality requirements and effects in, but no text. I reckon this would work well with the notepad approach. Plus it can help you playtest a structure before you write the text, too, which often saves time.[/color]
edited by Emily St Aubert on 10/11/2012
I like a visual difference between saved and not saved storylets (or automatic saves). Maybe the “Saved!” text can be used. A "Not Saved!"by default. When I click in save it changes for “Saved!” and if i type in the box it changes agin to “Not Saved!”.
[color=#009900]We’ve got a ‘not yet saved’ notification showing up now, as of the INSTRUMENT release.[/color]
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 11/8/2012
Something I’d like:
A way to create “referral” access codes.
So: I create an access code called ReferAFriend for Zero Summer and email it to my players. It’s only usable by new accounts. They share it on Facebook and Twitter with their friends, all of whom – wisely – click it, and start playing.
When they start the game, players with the ReferAFriend code are prompted to enter another player’s character name. The referrer then receives a little thank-you from us: a little bump of in-game currency and +1 to their Social Networking Quality, which if it dings 50 (or 100 or whatever) will fire a storylet with more goodies.
This as per Alexis.
We use this option in Zero Summer to do something we couldn’t otherwise: ensure certain cards come up more often without duplicating them and exposing the player to a situation where they have multiple copies in their hand at once.
We’d really, really like it if this could be recommended against but not removed. It’s been a definite net positive for us, and we think it has been for other worlds, too! :)
[color=#009900]This is deeply enough embedded in enough worlds that it won’t be practical or fair for us to remove it. So it’s staying, with a warning.[/color]
edited by Alexis on 1/3/2013
I understand this is a known issue and isn’t on the slate to be fixed any time soon, but I’d just like to add my voice: I think the ability to delete storylets and storylet branches is extremely critical, and needs to be implemented badly. As is, it’s the equivalent of a word processor which allows you to type characters, but not delete them. Yes, you can avoid having to delete storylets or branches by making sure your prepwork in Word or whatever is 100% sound, and being careful not to make any mistakes while constructing a storylet, lest the whole thing get scrapped – but that seems pretty cumbersome.
This might have been mentioned before. I would like it if usable items were highlighted in the Inventory some how, or always placed at the top of the list.
[color=#009900]As of THE INSTRUMENT, we’ve (semi) implemented this - items will show up next to the slot they’re associated with. I say ‘semi’ only because some creators may use slots for organisation rather than for equippables.[/color]
edited by Alexis Kennedy on 11/8/2012