Leave your suggestions for new Tool Features here!

Pressing Esc closes text-entry dialogue boxes.

A way to give images Alt Text that can display for blind players. (A big issue: a lot of the interactive fiction players are blind because it's the only kinds of games they can play.)

When you're watching the simulator and you see something you want to change, it'd be nice if you could click on the currently-displayed node in the Simulator -- and have the tree to the right move to that node.

@Lynnea - Thanks for your suggestion.

@ David - Thanks for your suggestion. For now, while you are at a particular node, use the 'find' feature to look up for this specific content to highlight in the tree.

1. a comments field for people writing directly in the Sequel tool so they can make references/take notes.

2. in terms of timing, could there be an option for "tap to advance"? Since I've got a lot of Player dialogue that isn't choice-based, I was thinking it would be nice to have the player tap to input her next "line", rather than just letting it scroll past.

I personally wouldn't want a tap-to-advance feature. Or at least, that feature disabled. That waiting for text to appear is what makes it feel like a conversation between people, instead of something pre-recorded. At least for me. I recommend playing the phone game Lifeline to see how that real-time delay feels. (It feels real.)

Oh, I meant specifically for per-line advances without pauses, at least as an option. I have a lot of dialogue that looks like this:

---

YOU

• Maybe there’s a hint around the floor boards.
• Check around the box where you found the key.

MORGAN

• I don’t know what I’ll find.
• the flashlight drains my batteries pretty bad too.

YOU

• Hmm, try to feel around maybe?
• if the wood’s soft, they might’ve carved something <<1 minute pause>>
• you still there?

---

And while it makes sense for Morgan's lines to scroll, your lines scrolling by doesn't make as much sense for my dialogue.

Good point! It might still be OK without depending on the UI feel, but I'm not sure.

I've got a fairly large cast, with different characters essentially texting the player in turn. When creating a new node, it defaults to the first name in my characters list--since each conversation can take up to a few dozen nodes, it's a little tedious to go back and select the proper character each time--plus it might make more of a possibility of making a mistake. Would it be possible to have the option to default new nodes to the last character you selected?

In the next update, we should have the ability to designate who's talking per text line, within a single node. This should make having back-and-forth conversations a lot easier and faster. Trees should look a lot cleaner and be easier to follow, since you could "compartmentalize" a conversation. Nevertheless, it's a good suggestion.

Is the countdown supposed to appear for every delay over 5 seconds? Will that appear on the finished app? It seems a little distracting at times when I want to have the character struggling to find the right thing to say. Will there be a way to select how delays are displayed maybe?

The Countdown is supposed to appear if there is going to be any delay longer than 20-seconds. Otherwise, you get the elipsis thingie.

The current 6-seconds is way too short and will be changed.

Copy & pasting nodes. I try to account for choices the player makes in small ways, which usually results in a few lines of dialogue down the line. It's a bit tiring having to make a new node with all the same dialogue, and add just one mode line. Copying a previously-written node, pasting it somewhere else, and adding a few more lines would be great.

Also agree will Ellen--will there be a way to select how delays are displayed in the future?

Control + Mouse down, then drag to a last node, will do a copy/paste of a single node

Control + SHIFT + Mouse down, then drag to a last node, will do a copy/paste of the node and the tree below it.

Note that I can't Copy/Paste into a Node somewhere already further up a tree though.

@Michael: Thank you! This is super helpful!

Oooh, in terms of mitigating the countdown, this new game has a little of what I'm talking about: http://www.polygon.com/2015/12/8/9873326/star-billions-is-an-ios-game-that-doesnt-always-want-you-around

As in, the game goes away for a bit, then alerts the player with a notification when there's new information in the game.

Colour-coding and labelling for nodes would be really useful.

Ideally it would be great to get to conditional text based on decisions higher up in the tree, to prevent loads of replication and branching off. But as it is, if we want to have basically the same dialogue with only slight changes based on earlier decisions, it would be really handy if we could colour-code particular nodes so that we can note there are differences in the dialogue on different branches there, to help keep track.

WE WANT OPEN NODE MODE!!!!!

I guess because of our way of working, we like to see the project in its entirety. In this way, we can visually keep track of the pacing and timing of where images /videos and gifs occur, where moments need to be broken up etc..

Anyway, Im still dreaming of having an open node mode....

I like the open node idea as well. As it is, I write everything in another program and then copy it into the authoring tool because I like being able to reference different parts of the story easily. I agree that seeing how the images, gifs, emojis are spaced would be helpful too.

Yeah, I'm doing what Jerica's doing -- writing the whole thing (in WordPad), and then pasting it into Sequel at the last possible moment. It's really hard to edit things in Sequel, because you can't just quickly read through an entire conversation without using the simulator.

I'd been about to suggest something called "Script View" -- which just displays all the dialogue (like a movie script, with the name of the speaker above what's said).

JERICA:

I like the open node idea as well.

DAVID:

Yeah, I'm doing what Jerica's doing...

I think that's along the same lines as what Debra's suggesting for Open Node mode.

You know what else? I really wish you could open a node just by clicking on it ONCE. (Otherwise it's click once on the plus sign, click once to select "Node", and then click.....TWICE to actually open the node.)

I always end up clicking twice on everything, just because I can't seem to remember which of those three operations is the one that requires the double-click. :)

I have a couple things on my wish list:

The ability to import the dialogue from a document. I prefer writing not in the tool and that would be a nice option.

The ability to do almost everything with keyboard commands. It would be really handy to be able to use a keyboard shortcut to open a new node and select the character. I like keyboard shortcuts better than using a mouse for the most part. It would make entering everything a lot faster and more efficient if I didn't have to use the mouse nearly as much.

How about an app for Sequel where we can create the bots using the app. The website doesn't work well on the mobile. This way it's easy to work on the go.

I'd really like to see a node for tracking inventory. It would make things a lot easier. I'm currently making a post apocalyptic rpg and I'm having a hard with this aspect, and forget randomization of finding supplies. I've seen it done on other bots, but I've yet to find out how to do it myself.

Would be nice to be able to export the whole tree of an episode as an AIML-file (Artificial Intelligent Markup Language). Importing such a file would also be nice. Also, switching between coding view and manual drawing mode would be a killer feature.