Novice-friendly Authoring of Plan-based Interactive Storyboards

StoryCanvas is a storyboard-based interactive story authoring and generation tool based on the author goal centric UNIVERSE-like story model in Wide Ruled. This project aims to provide a completely visual authoring and reading interface to an underlying plan-based, hierarchical representation of story structure. Inspired the effectiveness and expressiveness of storyboards and comic books, StoryCanvas utilizes the stylistic and structural elements of these mediums to provide graphical metaphors to the complex constraints, actions, and interactions available in the underlying story model. Like Wide Ruled, it aims to use familiar storytelling techniques to bring the power and flexibility of an interactive story generator to non-technical authors. This system also expands the scalability of our previous story authoring work by assisting the author in managing very large potential story spaces through constant, real-time feedback on the topology, coverage, and size of stories that can be generated by a particular StoryCanvas story world.

• James Skorupski and Michael Mateas. 2010. “Novice-friendly Authoring of Plan-based Interactive Storyboards”. In proceedings of AIIDE 2010.
• James Skorupski. 2009. “Storyboard Authoring of Plan-based Interactive Dramas.” Foundations of Digital Games Doctoral Consortium 2009.