1. Planning and writing
Planning and writing
Before you paint a single picture, you need a plan: story, rooms, puzzles and dialogs.
| What for | Free | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Ideas and notes | Paper, a notes app of your choice | What matters is that everything is in one place |
| Designing branching dialogs | Twine | Open source; ideal for playing through dialog trees before you build them in Visionaire |
| Puzzle charts | yEd, diagrams.net, Graphviz | See the guide "Puzzles Players Love", chapter 3 |
| Planning tasks | A kanban board or a simple spreadsheet | Columns "To do", "In progress", "Done" are enough |
What happens in Visionaire
You build dialogs in Visionaire in the "Dialogs" tab of the character. A dialog tested in Twine can be transferred there layer by layer. You can also export all texts of your game from Visionaire and import them again, for example for proofreading or translations. Details in the wiki under Texts and translations.
Rule to remember
Play it on paper or in Twine first, then build it in the editor. Changes are cheaper there.
Your task
Write the most important dialog of your game in Twine and let someone click through it.
