tl,dr: I want a point & click adventure engine that a monkey could handle.
So, I've got the ungodly idea to make an adventure game, but I don't have any kind of useful skills to speak of, which severely limits my choice in engines.
I've played enough adventure games to have a reasonable idea of how they're set up and I've written enough would-be novels to set the wole thing to a "nice" story, but to bring those two together is proving hard. I've been using draw.io to flowchart the monster, but although I am very fond of the simplicity of it, it is rather rigid in terms of adding stuff to one scene that I've found I needed several scenes later.
What I enjoy most about draw.io is that I can just plop down nodes, filll them out with whatever text I want and then go from there, so what I'd be looking for in other software is that functionality and the option to go back several chapters later to add, say, a clawhammer in chapter 2 that I need in chapter 11, but didn't know I needed until I got there. I could devise a way to find the clawhammer in chapter 11, but if that takes place in a nail salon, there really is no sound reason for a clawhammer to be there (though, apart from Better Call Saul I have no idea what goes on in a nail salon).
I've taken the liberty of attaching a JPG with an example I threw together. A simple scene like that already gets cluttered quickly and as you can see, I didn't plan ahead far enough to account for the Note in the clickables-section. This inability to backtrack without having to rearrange massive amounts of nodes really limits the ability to create more complex puzzles.
As we speak, I have Chat Mapper running in the background and even that looks rather complex to me, though admittedly I came here screaming bloody murder before I really got going with it. What scares me is the scripting box. I'm so far removed from coding that going cursive in here is a massive achievement for me.
Doth exist something like: Make box appear -> fill out box -> make some other boxes appear -> fill out those -> go back and define the function of said boxes in hindsight
I'm even having some trouble explaining what I want exactly. Now you know what my girfriend feels like. Anyway, Google already directs me to the big ones, like Articy, AGS, whatever else you get when googling Adventure Game Creator. I'm just hoping there's one soul on here that has an alternative but effective way of working with a likewise handicap. One footote though: I am not adverse to paying for software, but the realist in me insists that this is just another flight of fancy and a monthly subscription fee (what the hell, Articy?!) is better spent on a pornsite. Or, you know, rent.
