RenPy
Twine
Godot Engine
Unity
GDevelop
Unreal Engine
Ink by Inkle
Visual Novel Maker
Manuskript
Scrivener
yWriter
StoryMill
bibisco
oStorybook
Novelize
Novlr
ManuskriptBased on our record, RenPy seems to be a lot more popular than Manuskript. While we know about 16 links to RenPy, we've tracked only 1 mention of Manuskript. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
Food for thought: I have started, stopped, rewrote, given up, and restarted development of a visual novel engine over and over again. My vision is something kind of like Ren'Py[1] but with cross-device game saves, cleaner packaging, improved DRM, better support for complex nonlinear plot development, and better tools for developing game mechanics that go beyond clicking through paragraphs of text. A... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
This marks the second phase of my expedition into the realm of Artificial Intelligence, the realm of Stable Diffusion, and the intricate domain of Ren’py. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
Haven't used it but I hear nothing but good things about Ren'Py for Visual Novels. Source: 10 months ago
You could also try download Renpy 8.1 from the renpy.org to see if that helps if it is something with that copy of Renpy 8.0.3. Source: 10 months ago
You mentioned that your interests lay in more story/narrative roles? Get yourself a good book on Narrative Design, grab Ink+Unity or, better yet, Ren'py (renpy.org) and get to making some Narrative Games! Show your skills in not only writing but implementation. Source: 12 months ago
Looks like you want something that integrates well with your workflow. The closest to your description seems to be Manuskript although I haven't used it. But your requirement of "keeping notes and frameworks and linking back and forth" should be possible by stitching together existing Linux tools using a syntax like markdown or asciidoc so that you can use any text editor to write your story and use external tools... Source: over 2 years ago
Twine - Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
Scrivener - Scrivener is a content-generation tool for composing and structuring documents.
Godot Engine - Feature-packed 2D and 3D open source game engine.
yWriter - Free writing software designed by the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series. yWriter6 helps you write a book by organising chapters, scenes, characters and locations in an easy-to-use interface.
Unity - The multiplatform game creation tools for everyone.
StoryMill - Developers and publishers of Mac, Win, and iOS productivity, home and office and writing software such as MacGourmet, Paperless and many more. Based in MN.