Interactive Storytelling is a very exciting subject to explore.
Playable stories where 'reader' decisions alter the course of the story, giving greater agency and immersion over and in the story. It is a convergence of media Books (Writing) and Games.
The capabilities of these tools allow for dynamic story arcs, interactive decision making using variables, reasoning and logic. As well as rich media content like video, images and audio. The convergence continues with film/video, music, performance. I'm leaning into this convergence in many exciting ways.
I particularly feel interactive story software such as the ones I discuss below, allow for an easy relative starting point to create interactive stories and develop them into full blown games, immersive experiences, theatre productions... etc.
Twine and Arcweave can be integrated into unity/godot/unreal (+ other game engine) workflows, via abilities to the ubiquitous export formats; html (Twine), json (Arcweave).
The workflow allows for ambitious interoperable 'media fluid/agnostic' projects to get started very quickly and easily.
Ive perused quite a lot of options before deciding on focusing down this workflow and starting point.
There are so many variables and disciplines to digest, understand and utilise.
To have finally made a decision on what to use amidst the confusing myriad of tools and approaches available seems like a major milestone.
Twine
I used ChatGPT prompting to help me generate my general story and game idea into the relevant code to bring into twine. It is a very quick and satisfying way to prototype ideas. The writing is terrible... but that is because the machine wrote it (Soz Hal). I intend to write my own, but this is a starting point and a barebones model that can be endlessly iterated upon. Getting bogged down with too many details at the start leaves me stuck often, so I keep it simple and it becomes easier to start. Start as I mean to go on.
Im not totally cheating! Im using this process to help me learn the code so I could do it from scratch too.
I would like to focus on the story and mechanics of the 'game' rather than get too bogged down with coding right now. I'm grateful to have that option. Everything revolves around the centrality of story, environment, character, worldbuilding, so it is the right way to start. Writing while building a story makes for a more artistically engaging and varied creative storytelling process.
Here's a vid of a quick 'game' that I made.
Working title?
'Alex the adult in benefit world'
An experimental mini gamelet. Its an 'adventure' of self-discovery, of mystery and treachery.
To jump through the fiery hoops the DWP set out in order to survive this round of benefit review measures.
The task...
Procure and submit the correct documents = Keep your benefits.
Play > alex-the-adult-in-benefit-world.html
Arcweave
Aeon Timeline