Is it just me or is Narrat not as beginner friendly as I thought?

Site Feedback
1

I discovered Narrat around 5 days ago, and have been spending a few hours with it each day since and it has not been going well. The first 3 days I soend trying to simply create and open a project, then 4th was spent trying to get the play test window to open.

Today I finally started to try and edit the script and the whole thing no longer runs, just a white screen in playtest. I am a complete beginner, so I am not ruling out the possibility that I have made mistakes simply because I don’t have any base knowledge in this field but I seem to be having many issues with the engine.

  1. It is really complicated to set up, requiring multiple programs, many of which need to be tinkered with to work and apparently sometimes they just don’t, which doesn’t seem very beginner friendly.
  2. The scripting process seems easy to learn but navigating the website to find specific pieces of information is tricky. It’s format is a little strange, and finding where to start after getting it running is confusing as it throws so much non-beginner information at you at the beginning.
  3. It is giving me errors in code I haven’t even touched. I have no clue what some of these files do yet, and I open it up to find they have errors before I’ve even gotten to look around the demo code.

Once again, this may be due to my complete inexperience!

I just think the instructional pages are confusing to navigate and understand for a beginner. And the whole engine is super difficult to get my head around when I chose to give this a go as it said it was beginner friendly.

I am going to keep persevering, however I do think that the phrasing on the website might need to be changed (since as a beginner I’m not yet finding it friendly), or there needs to be clearer instructions for those who are complete beginners.

Thanks for reading, I hope this doesn’t come across as too negative. I just wanted to voice my current concerns and I hope to eventually figure this engine out and prove myself wrong​:+1:

2

Most of the technically complicated stuff is caused by the fact that node npm etc are a bit messy and inherently require using the terminal, among other things. But also lots of people have installed those things just following the normal instructions and it works fine. I think there might be some default security settings depending on machines that can get in the way of things working

But the benefit you get from that is that it uses very standard tools and you’re in control of the application itself and the code. Rather than having a more limited premade thing. And then you can export to any platform, and you can also modify that setup to do what you want if needed.

Another thing more generally is that making games involves digging into technical things one way or another, simple tools that don’t require figuring out tech stuff will be very limited.

Also, it’s a small open source engine with no budget. A lot of those issues could be solved with better docs, time to make an editor or some tool that automates installation and creation of projects etc. But hobbyist tools rarely get the chance to get polished because there’s no budget and I don’t work full time on it

Also for the specific problems, without seeing logs of the terminal, and browser devtools, and what the errors are and where etc, it’s hard to say. People need info to diagnose issues

3

Of course, I totally get that. For what it is Narrat seems phenomenal, that’s why I chose it as my first attempt at making a game.

It just really sucks that it has such a small team because it could be such an amazing piece of software.

I would love to see perhaps a YouTube series, or a more visual docs guide since I think that would really benefit beginners. (Especially me haha)

So apologies if my post comes across as too negative, I only wanted to share my experience thus far in hopes it can help future improvments.