Resources for Testing Game Story Ideas

I will soon be trying out simple nonlinear narrative ideas for my thesis research, and wanted to find (freely available) tools that will make doing so much easier.  Here are a few, some of which are great for beginners and non-programmers.  (Know of any other great tools? Let me know in the comments!)

inklewriter

 
If you want to create branching stories quickly and easily, this free graphical tool might just be for you.  It's not likely to be useful for me without access to its source code, but non-programmers should have some fun with it.

Ren'Py

This is how Ren'Py describes itself:

Ren'Py is a visual novel engine that helps you use words, images, and sounds to tell stories with the computer. These can be both visual novels and life simulation games. The easy to learn script language allows you to efficiently write large visual novels, while its Python scripting is enough for complex simulation games.

I like that beginners can use its simple scripting language to create interesting stories, and that I will be able to use Python to make more sophisticated games.  This is probably the first tool I'm going to download and try since it should be really fast to get going on the simplest of ideas.

Fabula

As per the Fabula website:

Fabula is an Open Source Python Game Engine suitable for adventure, role-playing and strategy games and digital interactive storytelling.  Fabula can be used as a library to develop your own games. As an alternative, you can use the Pygame-based graphical editor and the default game engine that come with fabula.

With this tool, you get into programmer's territory, but still get a lot for free.  I like that the engine was designed with storytelling in mind, and that like Ren'Py it uses Python, which should make it fairly easy to work with. I will likely give this one a try early on as well.

Orx

According to the Orx project site:

Orx is an open source, portable, lightweight, plugin-based, data-driven and extremely easy to use 2D-oriented game engine. It has been created to allow fast creation of games and prototypes.

The reason I include this project is because I think 2D is the way to go to test story ideas, and such an engine would make creating a 2D game much easier.  If the other tools aren't flexible enough to customize things as much as desired, then this might be the way to go (assuming you understand C/C++ programming).  I probably won't use this one right away since I don't need the power, but I have a feeling it could come in handy later on.

Research Snapshot for Fall 2012

Now that I'm back in school full time, it's a good time to have a look at where I am research-wise.  Here are some of the projects I'm working on and what progress I've made.  (My last snapshot was from Fall 2011, before I went on maternity leave, and has more detail about some of these projects.)

Cognitive Advantages of Augmented Reality

My work in this area was finally published with a learning spin at E-Learn.  You can check out the final abstract and paper on my website or read about it on this blog to see some possible future directions others can take.

Gram's House

Since last fall, this project has moved forward a bit.  One of our team members ran a pilot project that just wrapped up.  The study compared a slightly updated version of Gram's House that tracks player stats, and a new game created by my colleague's students.  It will be very interesting to see the data that was collected during the study.

In the meantime, we are also finding some new researchers who want to try for an NSF (or other) grant to further develop the project.  We've got a few ideas on how to make our project stand out among the many trying to do things like this with games, and I'm excited to see where we go!

Although not everything is public right now, you can track the project on my website.

Teaching and Learning Computer Science With Story

This project centred on the study we did in this past year's mini-course.  The study went well and we learned some interesting things (like the fact that story had little or not benefit over context).  However, the paper we submitted to SIGCSE was not accepted.

We are in the process of deciding what to do next, but I am leaning toward taking what we learned, doing a follow up study, and submitting to next year's conference.  I am not sure if I'd like to stick to the middle school age group or try something in an undergrad class.

Nonlinear Story in Games

This is the thread of research that will be my thesis.  In fact, my supervisor liked the ideas I had put together while on leave, so I have a good, solid direction now! In a nutshell, I want to use procedural rhetoric as a way to break apart story episodes in a reasonable way, and learning theory to dynamically arrange those pieces as well as entire episodes.

Before delving too deeply into my specific ideas, however, I'm going to finish some work I started last fall.  We're looking at nonlinear stories (that is, stories whose events are presented out of chronological order) and comparing them to nonlinear stories in games.  We are trying to see why games shy away from more sophisticated uses of nonlinear stories, which may lead to new ideas on how to do it.