How does the concept of chapters fit into StoryTime?

[mplooster]

Right now there are screens and segments. How do these fit into the traditional story concept of chapters? Do you want to support having chapters? Perhaps StoryTime is intended for short stories, in which case perhaps chapters are irrelevant?

[RasmusD]

I think screens are separate from the stories themselves. They're more of a tool for different elements of the game.
Segments in the story is really writer defined. That could include chapters, or not. The idea of chapters can be supported currently, but some features which would help this are: Resetting screen text to be empty. Centering text. Showing only one text box and not the image nor choicebox. A text fading in and out effect. If all of those features where implemented as individual markup options one could make a chapter demarcation using all of these by having all the things on screen fade away, have the chapter title fade in centered in the middle of the screen and fading out for the standard layout to reappear for the next chapter. This could then all be combined in a single markup element called "Chapter" or something to combine the effects.
Another practical bit about chapters is that it would be nice to allow for multiple .story files to encompass a single story. Such that one could perhaps organise the sotry a bit more into e.g. chapters in individual files. It would just require a markup which would say - if you reach this point load this story file and continue from there.

[mplooster]

Thanks, that answers my question. As I think about it, because the user has the ability to make different choices in the course of the story, it is a little more difficult to maintain the traditional concept of a chapter because the story is no longer linear. How does one even number the chapters, or setup a table of contents? I'm not sure these ideas fit well into a choose-your-own-adventure story (although, for some stories I suppose it would be fun to have something like an adventure map that readers could browse to help them make decisions during the story). Probably the idea of segments, where the segment can have a header of some kind, is the right way to go about it.

[RasmusD]

I think chapters do make sense. It depends on the story writer really, but a chapter could easily be set up in a way such that you cannot go back beyond a certain point in the story, e.g. between chapters, but your choices previously could still affect the chapter. It would essentially be a point in the graph you must always traverse "merging" all branches in effect.
And I totally think an adventure map could be cool.

[RasmusD]

Also, a segment is much smaller than a chapter. 1 segment usually equals 1 branching choice. There could be none and it just linearly points to another segment.
In effect segments are the nodes in the graph.