And you go to pinterest, and you look at pictures, and you have a set of pictures that are your character but just certain parts... So you edit the parts but the edit looks ugly so you do a sketch so you can commission an artist to draw them for you, but the sketch ends up too detail and you end up with the actual drawing...

Never heard of that.

Perhaps it’s because I’m trying to figure out how to use a database and backend for the thing I want to create. Let me explain: one of the features that has been both a blessing and a curse is the "Continue" button that tends to appear in every WIP.

This one, for example.

I utterly love and despise that button. I love it because it helps me decipher the coding behind the project and gain a better understanding of the story's branching. And yet, I hate it for the exact same reason.

What I want to achieve in my project is to eliminate the necessity of such a button. But how do I do that? I’ve been experimenting with creating a module that would allow the program to pre-load all the branches. Once the program compiles all the branches, it would deliver a cleaner text to the reader, effectively removing the need for the "Continue" button.

For example, let’s say we have the following branches:

1 Branch: “Today is a great day,” you thought, deciding to invite your $nameRO to: >The beach >More options" 2 Branch: “The beach is great, and $nameRO": 2.1 (if RO likes the beach): “loved the time.” 2.2 (if RO hates the beach): “hated the time.”

So, once these branches were processed in the module, it would look like this:

"The beach is great, and $nameRO loved the time.”

Rather than something like this:

"The beach is great, and $nameRO" Continue (bottom) "loved the time."

Of course, this is a simplistic example, but that’s what I wish to achieve.

There’s a big problem with this, and it’s mostly related to text flavor. Text flavor, as I intend to define it in this post, refers to variations of the text that tend to be no more than a few sentences and aren’t actually coded as a new branch. Such flavor text usualy can be seen with a simple if-sentence in the branche.

The coding in Twine and Dashingdon allows for if-statements inside the branches. However, the program I am planning to create treats everything as a string, as plain text, and can’t differentiate between what I intend to be a variable and what is just text. The program can't understand that, when I say $nameRO, I wish for that variable to be replaced by "Agustus" or the RO's name the player has chosen.