Started playing around with Twine and Harlowe. Not sure how good of a writer I am, I'm much more of a technical person. But figured I'd give it a go. I definitely see what you mean with Harlowe's limitations saving.
I decided to switch my effort over to Sugarcube. It certainly has it's own quirks, but I think I'm picking it up. Saving is magically easy, the exporting your saves to a physical file and (re-)import them at will is fantastic.
The lack of syntax highlighting makes it a lot easier to make a mistake in Sugarcube. Harlowe makes it really easy, say if you forget to close a macro to notice it before you've gotten too far. I've even had to add a custom story javascript to do some things that are already built into harlowe. For example, customizing the menu bar in Sugarcube takes a couple of lines in there. Also, I always store my variable as all lowercase, and then if needed uppercase the first such as a 'he/she' at the start of a sentence. In harlowe you just use the built-in '(upperfirst: $variable)' macro in-line and it's easy. In Sugarcube, I had to add a custom story javascript to do that, and then it's referenced as a function. Once it's implemented it's easy to use, but took a good bit of playing around to get it working... but now I have a good template I think.
I am building mine in Sugarcube now, but am also working on it in Harlowe at the same time. Been a good experience to figure out the pros and cons of each. Maybe I'm just sadistic.
If you get stuck I'm willing to try and help, if needed. No pressure, just an open ended offering.
Oh, this post has given me so much to think about. I think my preferences for coding are maybe...simpler is better for most things, but trickier is okay for things like saves/menus? Which Harlowe provides, for the most part. Thank you for your thoughts, this is fascinating.
I may genuinely take you up on that offer, if you don't mind! I don't see myself switching to SugarCube for this game since it's in Harlowe/I'm familiar with Harlowe and on a deadline already but...maybe for next time? Thank you so much, again.
Simpler is definitely easier... it took me a few solid days of pounding away on twine, sugarcube's documentation and Google to get what I think is a good template that I like. And even then I find I go back to tweak or change something I'm not happy with. There is definitely more coding than in harlowe, although once you figure out what you are trying to do it's easy to make it quickly repeatable.
Definitely stick with what you know and are comfortable using! That keeps the story coming and holds off the riots for falling behind. It's a significant effort to convert from one format to the other mid-stream, and then having to get up to speed on how to use it. If you wanted to see how I've been able to tweak mine, I can send the project, for purely research purposes of course.
By all means feel free to reach out! I've definitely gotten my feet wet with both formats now and enjoying it more than I had thought I would.
