Having never used the authoring tool, can you point me towards something to model it after?

I think a Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principal" style editor would be perfect, combined with some sort of scratch like Python IDE where each element is defined in terms of its reactive behaviors with other elements on a timeline.

I didn't say easy, I said not too difficult. Order of magnitude difference. :)

https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII?t=634

With some http://lighttable.com/