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Procedural Narrative Design with Parametrized StoryletsMax Kreminski�@maxkreminski�PhD Student, Expressive Intelligence Studio, UC Santa Cruz

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Motivation

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Reigns

Fallen London

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Storylets

  • Self-contained, reorderable units of narrative content
  • …with preconditions that dictate when they can be presented to the player
  • …and maybe effects that update the game state

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Starfreighter�(first prototype)

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Starfreighter�(inspiration)

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Starfreighter (mkremins.itch.io/starfreighter)

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Parametrized storylets

Query

part

Text template

part

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Parametrized storylets

Query

part

Text template

part

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Parametrized storylets

  • Self-contained, reorderable units of narrative content
  • …with roles where appropriate entities (characters, etc) can be slotted in
  • …and maybe effects that update the game state

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Hang on, aren’t these basically just planning operators?

  • Yes, kinda
  • Plus some machinery for rendering a particular set of variable bindings into text

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Drawbacks of parametrized storylets

  • Loss of precise control over narrative structure (though this is also the entire point)
  • Have to hand-roll the implementation
  • Same for authoring tools
  • Debugging can get tricky
  • Automatic selection gets slower with more storylets
  • Managing weighting functions for weighted random selection is hard
  • …but the advantages tend to win out in practice anyway! (IMO)

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Why parametrized storylets?

  • Simple, concrete alternative to static narrative structures
  • Powerful and flexible; lots of different things you can express in terms of queries
  • Design patterns starting to emerge

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Thank you!Max Kreminski�@maxkreminski�mkremins@ucsc.edu