"Stepwise" conversation hub stops after first step?

[wldmr]

Why does this stop the story after selecting step 1?

- (top)
* Nice weather we're having, eh? -> top
-
* Though the sky does darken a bit back there. -> top
-
* Wouldn't want to be caught in that … -> top

I'm trying to create "hub" style conversations, where you step through each topic one choice at a time (There'll be a couple of these topics, and I want to stitch them together using threads).

Example conversation

So you might start out with

1. Nice weather we're having, eh?
2. Listen, my car broke down.

• selecting 1 would result in something like

  1. Though the sky does darken a bit back there.
  2. Listen, my car broke down.
  

• while selecting 2 would result in.

  1. Nice weather we're having, eh?
  2. You think you help me out before that thunderstorm rolls up?
  

The idea is to be able to advance any thread individually without having to "back out" of any topic.

The above seems like an intuitive way of writing that structure to me:

1. Collect the choice for step 1, stop at gather
2. select step 1, loop around,
3. step 1 no longer there, go past gather, collect step 2
4. etc

But maybe my mental model is off. I just can't wrap my head around why the story just stops, without any sort of error message.

I can get the result I want by doing it this way:

- (step0)
* (step1) {step0} step 1 -> step0
* (step2) {step1} step 2 -> step0
* (step3) {step2} step 3 -> step0

But that requires keeping all these labels straight. What if I want to add another step in the middle 😱?! GASP

I'll resign myself to that if need be, but first I'd like to know why the first approach doesn't work. Any hints?

[joningold]

We recommend joining the inkle discord for coding advice rather than bug reporting - you'll get more responsive help there from a wider pool of people. https://discord.com/invite/inkle

The reason your ink is failing is that the structure you've made is a weave made of choice points and gathers. In a weave, the flow will automatically do choices, jump to the next gather, do the choices, jump to the next gather, and so on. By diverting back to topic, you've asked it to go right to the top of the chain again -- and since choices are by default once-only, there are no choices left.

But the structure you're trying to build is a normal weave structure! So you can do that simply by letting the system do what it does by default - dropping through from choice, to the next gather along. (Which also means you can have alternatives as your choice points as well.)

- 
* Nice weather we're having, eh? 
-
* Though the sky does darken a bit back there.
-
* Wouldn't want to be caught in that … 

[wldmr]

Oh wow, I wouldn't have expected an answer this week, let alone within the hour! Thanks for the quick response!

However, I feel I may not have made my point particularly well. The "flat weave" structure is basically what I started from, but I want multiple of those in a looping conversation. Maybe you missed my example playthrough? I only added it later, and it's collapsed by default. Or maybe I'm just not making any sense at all.

Anyway, thanks for pointing me to the discord, I'll throw my question over there.