Tools

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 documentation, contributed hundreds of examples and code libraries, and assisted in building the community knowledge to make the program useful in the long term.

Versu was a commercial project begun by myself and Richard Evans, and we built several significant pieces with it before the project was sidelined by Linden Lab, who owned it.

Character Engine is middleware from Spirit AI, designed to drive conversation with menu-based or natural language input, and compatible with multiple game engines including Unity and Unreal. I managed development of this product for three years.

Not counting these projects, I have been more peripherally engaged in developing, documenting, or evaluating several proprietary interactive narrative tools within specific studios; and giving consulting feedback on the StoryNexus and Varytale tools when they were in development.