Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling
Narrative in games and new media
[This post is part of a short series on Character Engine and what we’re doing at Spirit AI. I’m writing these posts with IF and interactive narrative folks in mind, but more general-audience versions of the same content are also appearing on Spirit’s Medium account. Follow us there if you’re interested in hearing regularly about what … Continue reading “Natural Language Understanding for Characters”
[For a couple of years now, I’ve reserved the first Tuesday of the month for a review of a book on writing or game design that might be of interest to IF folks. I’m still doing one of those in March, but it will come out the 19th, while I’m at GDC. Instead, this post is … Continue reading “Memory and Knowledge for Characters”
Ran across an interesting post from Krystian Majewski on design problems with multiple choice dialogue, which, among other things, draws on some play-testing reports on Emerald City Confidential: [Playfirst] did a user test of the indie point-and-click adventure Emerald City Confidential and they described how casual gamers reacted when they first encountered a multiple choice … Continue reading “Information Flow and Gradual Characterization”
Storylet systems are a way of organizing narrative content with more flexibility than the typical branching narrative.
Understanding how player stats map to story outcomes can be a challenge. This article looks at some strategies for simplifying and visualizing complex state spaces, including the use of ternary plots.
I’ve helped build a number of tools for interactive fiction and other forms of procedural storytelling. The ones in which I have been most extensively involved: Inform 7 has for over a decade been a favorite tool of authors creating parser-based textual IF. I collaborated on the design and feature set of the language, wrote … Continue reading “Tools”
