StoryAssembler

A narrative system for procedurally generating choice-based interactive narratives!

• Powered jointly by an HTN (hierarchical task network) planner and forward-state planner.
• Text and choices are dynamically assembled from pre-authored fragments that have effects.
• Narratives are driven by lists of states which are reached by fragment effects.
• Text templating is also available to make narratives dynamic on a word-by-word basis.

How to Run (Mac)

1. Start up Terminal
2. Navigate to the StoryAssembler root directory
3. Type command to start up a Python webserver: python -m SimpleHTTPServer
4. Start a web browser and go to http://localhost:8000

How to Run (Windows)

1. If you don't have Python, download it (2 or 3 is fine)
2. Start up Command
3. Navigate to the StoryAssembler root directory
4. Type command to start a webserver:

• Python 3: python -m http.server
• Python 2: python -m SimpleHttPServer

6. Start a web browser and go to http://localhost:8000

Example Scene

A simple example scene's files are located in

• js/StoryAssembler/data/scene-configs (the config file)
• js/StoryAssembler/data/scene-content (the content file)

How Do I Start Writing?

All the tutorials, walkthroughs, and technical explanations live in the wiki

Why Would I Want To Write With This Thing?

StoryAssembler's good for creating quality-based narratives. In general it's good if you want to write a story where any of these are true:

• most choices are gated by certain conditions
• how the story progresses is dynamically determined via state
• you want game variables from a concurrent game to influence the direction of the story or choice availability

The dynamic templating system means it's also good if:

• you want to write stories where different characters take on story roles
• individual qualities of characters influence choices or structure of the story

Who's Used This Thing?

A version of this system was used to drive the narrative component of Emma's Journey, a generative game about climate change created by UC Santa Cruz.

I Heard There's A Cool Narrative Viz For This Thing!

There's a viz for an older version of this library here, but because it still has some pernicious bugs, we're not including it in the library (for now).