Story Creator
Story Creator was a tool for making choose-your-own-adventure stories. It was inspired by ButtonTalk by Stephen Linhart, which was an older Mac tool that didn't support the Appearance Manager the last time I used it. Thanks Stephen! Your program was an inspiration.
Story Creator's main editor screen would let you choose the card to edit with the top left menu, choose fonts and colors for the body text, and also choose one to three different cards to link to. These were the player's "choices" as it were. It automatically created some special cards, including a title card and a "Not Finished" card that new links would point to by default.
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And here's a shot of the editor with a different card. This one is a game over, so the only link the player can follow is back to the title page.
As you can imagine, the card choice menu for Jacob's Story got really long. JS has 150 cards, some longer than others. If for some reason you want to try it, you can read the whole thing online.
There was a cute dialog for setting the story meta info. The runoff text was probably due to text sizes being optimized for display in the MacOS X font. Story Creator was being made right around the time OS X was becoming popular and porting applications was a bit of a chore.
And, of course, there was a test mode to simulate what the card would look like in the separate story viewer application. Incidentally this was how Story Creator started, except it was a short application written in C that would take data from the resource fork of a file and display it in this manner. The REALBasic editor was an afterthought.
There was also a version of Story Creator compiled for MacOS X, and this one might have had fewer bugs than the older version that only ran on Classic. Certainly the menu in the top left looks like it was aligned better.
Story Creator was a fun project, but its time has passed.
Compared to interactive fiction, choose-your-own-adventure-style text can be easier for beginners to explore. Facing just three or four choices about what to do at each juncture is much less intimidating than facing a virtually unlimited number of possible text commands. With the Internet publishing these types of stories is easier than ever, so give it a try! You might discover a hidden talent.
