Ange Andrianavalona. Author, Illustrator, Painter

photo by ktylerconk

I’ve found a very useful tool that can be used as a writing framework.
This tool is called SWAT and is provided by Chris Crawford.
After a quick look, I think i’ll give it a try for my next children’s book and game project.
You should take a look and find if there is something for you.

Notes taken from the website.

What is Interactive Storytelling?

Interactive storytelling is a new medium of artistic expression. It utilizes the greatest strength of the computer interactivity while drawing on the traditions of classic storytelling. The result is a unique experience where you play the protagonist of a virtual story. Interactive Storytelling provides all the drama and emotional complexity that one expects from a good story, and additionally invites you to influence the unfolding of the narrative according to your own thoughts and emotions.

Lot of useful informations in the rest of this entry

Building a world

An author builds the components of a world that will interact with the storyplayer as s/he seeks to attain a goal and reach the story’s ending.
There may be thousands of possible paths to that ending, and the satisfaction of reaching it will depend on the richness the author (you) build into your storyworld.

Perhaps you already have ideas for what will happen in your storyworld. You may have some settings planned. Some characters. A protagonist, who will represent the storyplayer. Some important objects, like a murder weapon or a magical sword. And a few key events.

These tutorials will help you translate these story elements into an interactive storyworld. The tool that you will use to do this is SWAT (StoryWorld Authoring Tool).

Let’s define some storyworld elements:
SWAT TUTORIAL

The last element in this list, Event, is a special kind of Sentence. Events drive what happens in a storyworld. Notice that the example Event combines two Actors and a Verb.

« Event » and the rest of the elements listed in the left column are all classes of words in Sappho, the simplified language through which you’ll tell the computer how to operate your storyworld. (See Chris’s comments About Sappho.)

Sappho provides the grammar, you create the words. SWAT helps you put it all together.

Ange’s note : Please check Storyworld components : Actors, Relationships, Props, Sentences, Stages, Verbs for more informations.

The story engine

This series of flow charts depicts, in deepening levels of detail, the processing decisions made by the Story Engine in running the storyworld. First is the main engine loop:

The Story Engine processes all Actors actions and travel:

For each Actor, the Story Engine makes a cascading set of decisions and processes his or her Plan(s):

To execute a Plan entails the following series of steps:

The Actor’s Reaction involves a set of decisions and calculations, as follows:

The Story Engine performs the following steps for each Option under consideration by a ReactingActor:

And that’s all there is to it! All right, that’s a fib…believe it or not, this is a simplified version of what happens. But it gives you the big picture of what the Engine does, in what order, to make things happen in your storyworld.

Downloadable versions of these flowcharts can be found in Snips, Tips, and Tricks.

This tutorial by Storytron, Inc. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Thoughts Posted on 18 janvier 2009 by Ange