Computer-Assisted Authoring of Interactive Narratives
M. Kapadia, J. Falk, F. Zünd, M. Marti, R. Sumner, M. Gross
Proceedings of the 19th Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (San Francisco, CA, USA, February 27 - March 1, 2015), pp. 85-92
Abstract
This paper explores new authoring paradigms and computer-assisted authoring tools for free-form interactive narratives. We present a new design formalism, Interactive Behavior Trees (IBTs), which decouples the monitoring of user input, the narrative, and how the user may influence the story outcome. We introduce automation tools for IBTs, to help the author detect and automatically resolve inconsistencies in the authored narrative, or conflicting user interactions that may hinder story progression. We compare IBTs to traditional story graph representations and show that our formalism better scales with the number of story arcs, and the degree and granularity of user input. The authoring time is further reduced with the help of automation, and errors are completely avoided. Our approach enables content creators to easily author complex, branching narratives with multiple story arcs in a modular, extensible fashion while empowering players with the agency to freely interact with the characters in the story and the world they inhabit.
