StoryAssembler

Abstract

Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form of interactive storytelling that have been around for many years. But as long as this form has existed, it has grappled with a persistent design problem: consistently presenting choices that feel both effective and relevant. Brute force can achieve the desired effect, but usually at the cost of prohibitively high authorial burden. To tackle this, generative approaches, such as Mawhorter's Dunyazad, facilitate authoring procedural choice content for reuse and recombination. However, many such systems, while successful on technical levels, have yet to to be used to author large enough structures to support a full game, and require a high technical threshold for authors to use. To further development in this space, we present StoryAssembler, an open source generative narrative system that creates dynamic choice-driven narratives. It formed a critical part of Emma's Journey, an interactive narrative game, the initial version of which was collaboratively authored by a team of six writers. In the course of the game's creation, useful authoring patterns and design lessons were learned, as well as techniques that made the system approachable for first-time users.