Introducing: Chord Writer

It has been exactly 27 days since I began designing and building the Chord language. In that time Sharpee (now referred to as the platform) has been scrubbed of many of its early cruft because creating Chord repeatedly exposed those seams. There were embarrassing event handlers that never acted and errors swallowed in places. Luckily, nothing major and the architecture supported Chord rather easily.

But it wasn't enough to create just the language. I want to actually start writing IF games and I like using good tools like Inform 7 to do that. So the Chord Writer application was a natural evolution from the language. Note: I have moved from using Windows on a daily basis to using MacOS and the Chord Writer will be a MacOS ARM download for now. I have a handful of followers, so I'm not too worried about coverage, but if there is a squeaky request for other platforms and chipsets, I will do my best to accommodate it.

Chord Writer has very similar features to Inform 7's IDE including an Index (not as pretty or detailed), a Build log, a Play tab, a Diagnosis tab (runtime errors), and a Testing tab (branched automated play-testing with intelligent programmatic capabilities).

The Project Pane, opened by default, shows Chord-specific folders for Story, Transcript Tests, Assets (audio and images), Web Template (the build index.html used to compile the story), and Other (uncategorized files in the project folder). I do have an ADR for Web Extensions, but that's on the TODO list. Story type extensions would just be .chord Chord language files you can import into a .story. I do not have the editor arranged to specifically create/edit/manage extensions, but that's certainly somewhere in the future.

The Testing tab runs the transcript tests listed in that folder in the Project Pane. The root test has a seed to pin all randomized outcomes and other testing tools to choose variations to test all branches of a story. Transcript test files use a parent-child syntax where all children document their parent.

I still have to integrate documentation into the IDE, embed a sample story, add a publish feature, a transcript editor, and a handful of other tasks to "button down" version 1, but the editor and testing tools are 99% complete.

Note the website https://sharpee.net/ has a live Chord playground to run ad-hoc stories.

For now, I'll take requests for testers because it's not ready to be a public download quite.

Here are more screenshots of the Chord Writer...