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RE: The best tools to create interactive fiction, text adventures and visual novels, with or without programming knowledge
What a brilliant service this post is! Just today I was thinking about how to do this, and there's your post that takes all the guesswork out of it! I can only give you $0.10 with my upvote, but you'll win a Best of Steemit award tomorrow, and my undying thanks in the form of a follow, and, well, anything else I can think of. When I'm rich and famous, I'll always take your calls.
Thanks so much for your kind words! Just doing my part to keep interactive fiction alive :) It can be a bit tough to find all of these tools, so I thought an overview like this might be quite interesting to people. Twine and Ren'Py are well known by now I believe, but Ink for example is fairly new compared to the other tools. It was used in the highly acclaimed indie game 80 days, whose creators are also the creators of Ink.
My brain's been going overtime since I read this. Honestly, the number of applications for this kind of thing is ridiculous. I'm tempted to make a game with one of these and use it as a resume. I'm going to have the kids in my history classes build these and play test them on each other. I'm loving the ease of use of these things! You're my hero!
For a resume, a multiple choice interactive fiction created with Twine or Ink would probably be best. I think you can even insert pictures and videos instead of just having text passages displayed. You could for example create an interactive FAQ and one of the questions is "How do you look?" and the answer would be a picture of you that gets displayed. If the app you end up using can't do that out of the box, all of the apps I've shown can be extended with new features if you can program or if you find a plugin someone else has written with the functionality you need.
For teaching kids, Twine is probably best since you can explain how to use it in less than 5 minutes. Just make sure to tell them to close the text editing windows that you open by double clicking on a node in the flow chart by pressing on the X in the top right corner, if you close it any other way, for example by clicking outside of the text editing window, the [[links in brackets]] don't get parsed correctly, seems to be a bug. Other than that kids should have no problem figuring out how to use it extremely quickly, it's quite intuitive once you understand the basics.
Ink is more involved, you have to learn the format you need to write stories in, but it's very easy to pick up since you can just learn the basics and get very far with those, just like you can do with Twine. Just read the first few pages of the manual that comes with the Inkle Editor, that should be more than enough to start and then you can probably explain the basics in 10 minutes. The upside of Ink is that you can easily share the created stories or just snippets of them to show a specific part off, you just copy and paste the text from the editor. Could be easily written to the blackboard as well. With Twine to show something you'd have to use a projector and to share a story with someone you have to share the story file, so Ink might be easier to deal with.
Thanks. I'll share what we end up doing.
@cristof that's great idea... if you want some basic info about Twine I can give it too as I made few things with it before (Just basic info though, but it's enough to create something that's not complex like the game I made)
If you want just PM me on Discord.
My sons and I are about to sit down and try making something, just to see how the tools work.