I'm having a bit of an issue.
See, now that the relationships are starting to settle, I'm trying to focus more on getting the family trees set up. And yeah, I could just make it myself the way I've been doing everything else, but keeping track of everything manually is...a bit of a chore.
To that end, I've been trying to find a free family tree maker/creator that will serve my needs: namely, something that will 1) allow me to add multiple unrelated trees, and 2) visually (and preferably automatically/intuitively) track more than just direct parent-child relationships. Somehow this is MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to find than I thought it would be!
Tomoboard - pros: built explicitly for the game so it includes all of the in-game relationship labels. cons: literally everything else. It's slow and janky on my computer, making connections as they're labeled in-game doesn't actually translate to marking them as family members (e.g. marking two Miis as "spouses" doesn't actually list them as spouses on the "family" tab, but marking them as "married" does; however, there is no secret other option to mark offspring as their children, as neither "family" nor "relative" do anything to the "family" tab)
Free Fantasy Family Tree Maker from Story Legend - pros: clean layout, easy to add characters wherever. cons: a lot of options that would probably be useful to me are locked behind a paywall; also it doesn't visually mark siblings (you have to add an ancestor to connect them), nor does it support marking cousins (I could note it manually in the "notes" section for each character, but that still doesn't show up on the chart)
Family-Tree-Builder.com - only supports a single lineage
SmartDraw's "Free Family Tree Maker" - actually just a "tree maker" and doesn't actually support tracking/maintaining family relations
familytreesimple.com - it's...definitely meant for real people (I don't even have the option to nix the country of origin on everybody), and rather than converging trees, it just...duplicates things? (Avery and Maverick started dating, so I tried marking them as "partners" and instead of shifting things around to converge the two trees, it just added like...a sort of "shortcut" copy of each of them to each other's trees? I tested adding a child to them and it just doubles it on each tree :|a not really sure how this is supposed to be functional...)
My Simple Family Tree - again, actually meant to be used for real people and doesn't really support unrelated trees being added; on top of that, the way it marks relations depends on the person you're focused on and the view you're in (ancestors or descendants), and ancestral view only shows direct ancestors (not aunts/uncles/cousins)
OC Toolkit's Family Tree - very simple. A little too simple. Children are marked via two arrows (one from each parent), and siblings aren't marked at all. Also, some of the lines are black, some are gray, some are gray and dashed, and some are blue, and I don't know why or how to change it :|a
Family Tree Craft - first off, the controls are SUPER fucking janky. Secondly...I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add a child to both parents?? Needless to say, it also does not visibly mark siblings.
World Anvil - non-starter; whatever kind of family tree building tool they have, if it even supports functions unique to family relations, is locked behind a paywall. Fuck you.
Roll For Fantasy - ....idefk how to work this thing, wtf?
Creately - again, just a basic tree maker, and really only functional for creating a direct lineage
Vondy - pretty sure this is AI. Fuck off.
Kintree - doesn't support unrelated trees being added, doesn't really like showing converging trees, and doesn't support sibling/cousin marking
I prefer browser-based options bc generally speaking, people hate making Mac versions of shit, and it's kind of a little bit annoying to go through the whole thing of downloading the thing and telling my computer it's okay to open and then finding out it's useless anyway.
I just...don't understand what's so hard about what I'm asking for??
