Aaron A. Reed's Blog, page 7
August 2, 2019
Working On Our Thoughts:
I recently was invited to speak on behalf of Spirit AI at the Virtual Beings Summit in San Francisco, a unique group of innovators working on various facets of one of today’s most interesting challenges: creating lifelike digital characters and avatars. Maybe counterintuitively, I decided to use my time to focus less on the cutting-edge work we’re doing with Character Engine and more on some lessons from the past.
I believe we’re...
July 30, 2019
“Downcrawl” is now Available!
Today I’m pleased to announce the release of my second tabletop roleplaying book, Downcrawl, a tool for gamemasters that helps them tell procedural stories in a weird, endless underground wilderness.
Check out Downcrawl here.Compatible with any fantasy roleplaying system, Downcrawl’s setting is a place called the Deep, Deep Down, an underground empire so far from the surface that the sun and sky are only legends, and so vast that no bounds can be placed on its dimensions or contents.
Downcrawl’...
July 5, 2019
Spirit AI: Tightening the Edit Loop in Character Engine
A key way for developers to become more efficient is finding ways to shorten the time between making a change and seeing it in action. In coding, this is sometimes called the “edit-compile-test loop”: if after making a change to code you need to sit through a lengthy recompile, a staging process, a reboot of an engine and a reload and reinitialization of a project — all to just see if the single change you made works — this is much le...
May 24, 2019
More Readable Project Files in Character Engine
Anyone designing an authoring tool for a dynamic system faces a particular dilemma: IDE or DSL? That is, should you make an integrated development environment that provides an abstracted authoring interface into the underlying data, with high-level features and visualizations tailored to working with that particular data, or design a domain-specific language, a specification and compiler for authoring content in your system purely...
April 19, 2019
Designing Playable Conversational Spaces
My colleagues and I at Spirit AI have been blogging for the past few months about the unique possibilities and challenges of authoring for Character Engine. While the system supports multiple possible models of input, including gestures or dynamic menus, one mode supports full natural language input. Handling this kind of input is obviously a challenge, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think.
Character Engine can replace both fixed player input (a set of menu options) and fixed NP...
April 4, 2019
The 2019 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction
I’m very pleased to announce that the 2019 Spring Thing Festival of Interactive Fiction, an annual event for the last eighteen years, is now live!
This year, there are twenty entries spread across two categories. Authors chose whether to submit games to the Main Festival, where they are eligible for ribbon nominations and a prize pool, or the Back Garden, which opts out of ribbons and prizes but has looser entry requirements (including allowing excerpts from unfinished or commercial games).
In...
March 25, 2019
ZeIFgeist: “Expats” by Hala Alyan
A series in which I muse about projects that label themselves “interactive fiction” on Twitter, and how the term continues to evolve as a label and a conversation.body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}
The rain leaves birthmarks. It's always midnight ... " Read @HalaNAlyan's "INTERACTIVE FICTION :: EXPATS" from the March issue here! https://t.co/tNFm6sSGSE
“INTERACTIVE FICTION :: EXPATS” by Hala Alyan (availabl...
November 8, 2018
Conversations in Skyrim VR
I’m standing just outside the gates of Whiterun in a snowstorm, huddled with a guard around the bright glow of a fire, and even though I know he can’t hear me I’m trying to have a conversation with him.
Against my better judgment, my partner has talked me into trying Skyrim VR. I loved Skyrim, but have complex feelings about VR: I’m all about being immersed in rich, explorable environments, but also get nauseous very easily, so most VR games with motion are non-starters. (The one exception for...
November 1, 2018
Narrative Logics
“Changeful Tales” is a blog series where I rework my dissertation into more bite-sized, readable, and visible ideas.
While narrative mechanics represent the ways a player can interact with a game’s story, let’s consider as well what the system can do with those interactions: the internal processes that act on player input, perform operations on it (simple or complex), and return new bits of story (or lexia). As a result of this loop, the player interprets their actions as operat...
