Texture is now available! After the alpha version was released we’ve been hard at work adding features and fixing bugs. Most of the bugs and features suggested in the alpha release thread have been fixed and implemented, with a bunch of others.
In addition to the development system, we have a library of stories with launch titles from Jake Elliott (Kentucky Route Zero), Robert Yang (Cobra Club) and Jim Munroe. Anyone can publish their Texture stories in the public library!
My XYZZY awards writeup of 2014 technology never got written, but what it amounted to (on the Texture front) was - Texture got robbed by being prematurely nominated, and I want to see this technology in release form.
Awesome. I’ve been thinking recently of texture-izing one of my game ideas, and this is the perfect incentive. Much thanks to Juhana and Jim for all their work.
I recognize that being able to record, manipulate, and print strings is relatively complicated to set up. But I’m dismayed to discover that I can’t (for example) record and save a name for the PC.
I guess you mean selecting one of a specified number of verbs as a field since there’s no keyboard input?
Another suggestion (and I did test a bit so I’m really sorry I didn’t come up with this sooner) is to mark verb phrases as “persistent”, meaning they will show up on every page that has actionable words. For example “examine” might have a use everywhere.
That way you could set up a normal verb row “examine/open/close/use/talk to” without manually needing to repeat them on every page.
Along those lines is if you could mark a noun in the text as “portable” which would allow you to drag it from the screen into an “inventory” (or into the persistent verb list) to be dropped on something else. “You see a silver_key on the table.” drag silver key to bottom of screen, then on another screen you could drag “silver key” to “locked door”.
We discussed the possibility of including more variable types, but decided against it because it would introduce too much complexity to the IDE. We’re planning to release the reader as a JavaScript library at some point so you could use JavaScript to write the story logic (without using the IDE.) Another distant possiblity is to introduce a “power user mode” to the IDE with open fields where you could use a subset of JavaScript to set variables and write more complex conditions to check them.