Project Director: Hartmut Koenitz, LCC, Georgia Tech
Project website: http://lcc.gatech.edu/~hkoenitz/ASG/
The Advanced Stories Group (ASG) at Georgia Tech was founded by PhD student Hartmut Koenitz in 2005. Dr. Janet Murray is the academic adviser to the ASG. The group's work extends the practice and understanding of interactive storytelling by creating a formal structure for describing and authoring interactive stories, developing authoring tools that implement those models, and creating interactive narrative pieces that illustrate the expressive possibilities of the form. The result is an open-source, extensible system for interactive narrative production.
Roles
I worked with the ASG from 2006-2008. This period saw the research group transition from a purely theoretical focus to releasing the software tools that enabled interactive narrative production based on the model the group developed. My involvement and project roles spanned three phases: theory and modeling; game development and graphics; and user experience, interface and software development.
Each phase delivered a product for release. Phase 1 focused on developing a narrative model that could be rendered procedurally and as a human-readable document. The deliverable the group produced was ASML (Advanced Stories Markup Language), based on XML. Phase 2 created a stand-alone engine that rendered the ASML into an interactive work. Phase 3 developed an authoring environment with a GUI, opening interactive narrative development to a wider audience.
Phase 1: ASML
You can download a sample, functional ASML file for "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells" here.
(I wrote this one as a joke, glorious camp and all. The interactive piece isn't available for distribution due to some copyright issues, but you can email me to arrange a demo for "educational purposes.")
The narrative model reflected in ASML atomizes action into discrete units, or beats. Decision history is tracked via creator-defined counters, and the story path is ultimately created on the fly based on counter values and qualifying states assigned to each beat. The functions that tell the engine which nodes and elements should be rendered are also included in the ASML. (Each engine, of course, would render those according to its purpose. The current engine supports 2D images and SWF animation and sound; however, ASML is designed to be engine-agnostic, and would run in a hypothetical 3D engine assuming appropriate assets and functions were provided.) My work in this stage included narrative theory, narrative modeling and interactive modeling, and semantic analysis of narrative structures in various legacy media forms.
Phase 2: Advanced Stories Engine
You can try out the first title produced for the ASE, written collaboratively by the ASG. I did all the character designs, backgrounds, and other illustrations. "Red's Walk Through the Woods" retells the tale of Little Red Riding Hood as an interactive storybook. Contains some adult themes. Download the package here. Unzip. Open the file called "ASMLEngine047.swf" and the story will load. Click on the speech bubbles or environmental hot spots to progress.
The second phase focused on developing the software engine that would render the ASML file as an interactive artifact. The goal was to have a free, cross-platform application that could be launched on its own. The ASE (Advanced Stories Engine) was coded in Flash, and uses the free Flash Player to run. The engine is invisible to the player, and does not require separate installation or configuration to run. The player just opens it, and the story immediately loads and runs in its own window.
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Phase 3: Advanced Stories Builder
I was resposible for the user interface and user experience, and I was also the Test Lead and user advocate. The ASB software is complete, although the ASB public launch is still being planned while the ASG is working out the licensing terms. You can
email me to arrange a demo, or
contact the ASG directly for the latest information about the launch.
The third phase was dedicated to developing a stand-alone authoring environment for the creation of ASML-based interactive works. The first two stories we produced were written by hand in a text editor. In addition to being slow, this method tends to create malformed code due to mistyping and other human error. It can also be an alien way for artists from analog media, such as writers and filmmakes, to work. Nor is it helpful for visualization or tracking of the stories interactive structure.
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The ASB (Advanced Stories Builder) solves those problems by using a graphical user interface that requires no knowledge of ASML. The builder automatically creates an ASML story file when the user saves a project. It connects the graphic assets to the character and narrative pieces, and uses a drag-and-drop scene builder. Users can test the story on the fly, which enables a fluid creative process. The bulilder also incles a plotting feature that displays the beats in a story and their interconnections.
