Starting all over again

Hello everyone,

It has been a very long time since I posted here. But in that time, I've continued to grow my skills and I believe that the Fable Maker I was working on previously could be improved a lot. So my only option is to start from scratch and rebuild the entire software again. Thanks to the Godot Engine, I can still reuse some old code and ideas with relative ease so I don't think it should take too long for things to get going again.

Current Plans:

I want Fable Maker to be a lot more user-friendly and also a lot more performant as Fable Maker V1 had quite a lot of bugs and performance issues that were not resolved and couldn't easily be fixed due to how it was built. I plan to fix most of these issues with Fable Maker V2.

Fable Maker V2 will use a more fluid storyline system for creating stories. Each modifiable component will be its own separate element that you place in the storyline when you need it. I believe this will improve the ease of use a lot compared to the current editor. The separation of components should make it better and more customizable as well by allowing me to add and edit individual components as needed. There are already over 20 different elements that will be useable in the storyline to bring your stories to life.

Save files will also be overhauled, meaning current Fable Maker files will not be compatible with FM V2. I don't have any plans set in stone, but they most likely won't use JSON for the story file. I'm hoping to use a more custom but simple format that will complement the simplicity of the new drag and drop elements of the editor.

To improve performance I've also moved from using Godot's inbuilt GDscript to using C# which is roughly 4 times faster! This should help keep the editor snappy, although it will still have issues with larger stories as that issue seems to be related to rendering and RAM which I am not as knowledgeable about. I hope to figure out a better workaround for that issue this time.

I have even more ideas for Fable Maker now than I did when I originally started! I genuinely hope I can create something that people will find useful, easy, and fun to use. The screenshot below is a small look at what ideas I have for Fable Maker.  As you can see it is completely different from the older FM.  Things are still very early though, so it will still take some time before I have something useable to upload to here. But stay tuned and let me know what you'd like to see in Fable Maker!

(Also yes there will be a Dark Mode option. I'm not evil.)