Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shakespeare. Show all posts

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Narrative systems workflow; using Fourier analysis and level design metaphors to systemize stories.

This assumes familiarity with Shakespeare, a procedurally-branching narrative system that I'm designing. For an overview / introduction, read "More talk, more rock."

I started by arguing that interactive fiction's narrative systems expose too much complexity and detail to its authors and players, or at least more than most people need or want. With Shakespeare, I hope to achieve just a fraction of that functionality, and I think that fraction is enough to be very compelling while facilitating a writer's work.

In engineering Shakespeare, I think of the system in four parts:
a) The real-time system that runs algorithms, interfaces with the game as the player plays.
b) The data / format of narrative itself, how it's structured.
c) The Unity editor interface for generating, editing, or creating the narrative data.
d) The suggested workflow / instructions for using that interface.

Now that I have enough of a base implemented, I'm starting to think more about that last part, the operations design. Roughly, I think the tool could work like this: