pangamebook VS twinejs

I recommend pangamebook to generate printable PDFs and electronic EPUBs from the same source. It's a pandoc filter, so you can even choose the preferred format to type in - Markdown, RTF, Orgmode, ODT…

I have thought of adding support for hidden variables by duplicating paragraphs to my pangamebook script. Probably as a separate script, to keep things simpler.

EPUB would indeed have been nice. (Pandoc can export to EPUB. Makes it easy to batch-export all books to different formats and could also do whatever other processing you want to do. And, coincidentally (ahem), I also made a filter for Pandoc that makes it possible to automatically add gamebook cross-references and/or shuffle the paragraphs automatically... https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook).

There are also command-line tools for writing choice-based i-f, that it sounds like you want to do, like some command-line variants of Twine. Never tried, but I suppose most of those also can run in Termux as well as on a laptop. I know my own little tool (pangamebook) works at least, because I test it regularly on my phone to make sure it works there if I ever want to edit a story away from my computer.

I don't think I qualify as a true gamebook creator (yet?), but this is the latest tool I made for making gamebooks (the older ones are obsolete): https://github.com/lifelike/pangamebook

I made two different tools for PDF downloads (my old gamebookformat and my newer, barely released yet, pangamebook. Your approach is different though... My idea was always to start from a format that is static and can not have any weird dynamic things that is not possible to include in a book. But Twine is full of precisely those weird things? How do you deal with that, like if there is conditional text in a paragraph, or inlined JavaScript? For my gamebookformat I experimented with Twine-export instead, because turning a static gamebook into Twince-code is kind of doable, and there is nothing that should not be possible to convert in that direction, but converting from Twine seemed much more difficult?

I think you and your kid would have fun designing a Choose Your Own Adventure game in Twine. https://twinery.org/

FWIW, there are a bunch of simple modern GUI builders, including GUI builders for the web, but none of them are popular, due to the sweet spot of supply and demand that Hypercard hit.

When Hypercard launched, it came with every Mac, it was free, and there was nothing else like it available on the Mac. On the Mac, the alternative to Hypercard was to layout UI widgets in code, with no GUI builder at all, or eventually to pay $$$ for a professional-grade IDE like CodeWarrior. As an entry-level user with no budget, if you wanted a GUI builder for the Mac, you got Hypercard, or nothing. This created a community of Hypercard enthusiasts.

Furthermore, when Hypercard launched, Macs had a standard screen resolution. Every Mac sold had a screen resolution of 512x342 pixels, so you could know for sure how your cards would look on any Mac. Supporting resizable GUIs is one of the hardest things to do in any GUI builder. (How should the buttons layout when the screen gets very small, like a phone? Or very wide, like a 16:9 monitor?) Today, Xcode uses a sophisticated constraint solver / theorem prover to allow developers to build resizable UIs in a GUI; it works pretty well, I think, but it's never going to be as easy to learn as "drag the button onto the screen and it's going to look exactly like that everywhere."

The last issue is the real killer for modern Hypercard wannabes: it's a small step from a web GUI builder to raw HTML/CSS. You don't have to pay big bucks to have access to professional-grade HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sure, they're not that easy to learn, but you can teach a kid to write interactive web pages, no problem.

As a result, the demand for a simple GUI builder is lower than it was for Hypercard, and even when you do capture a user, they tend to outgrow your product, and there are a zillion competitors, so none of them can build a community with real traction.

There's ChoiceScript by Choice Of Games. It's more along the lines of Choose Your Own Adventure. If you're hoping to make something with a fair amount of random events, you might want to check out Twine.

I'm trying to update tweego with the story format harlowe 3.3.7. I've copied the .json and .icon files for Harlowe 3.3.7 from here : https://github.com/klembot/twinejs/tree/develop/public/story-formats

Here are 2 interactive story game engines: * https://www.renpy.org/ * https://twinery.org/

You use something like https://twinery.org/ for creating the dialogues, and then write abstract code to handle that.

The engine here https://twinery.org/