Storytron Tutorials - Introduction

Welcome to the exciting frontier of storyworld authoring! Here is where you will build the components of a world that will interact with the storyplayer as s/he seeks to attain a goal and reach the story’s ending. There may be thousands of possible paths to that ending, and the satisfaction of reaching it will depend on the richness you build into your storyworld.

Perhaps you already have ideas for what will happen in your storyworld. You may have some settings planned. Some characters. A protagonist, who will represent the storyplayer. Some important objects, like a murder weapon or a magical sword. And a few key events.

These tutorials will help you translate these story elements into an interactive storyworld. The tool that you will use to do this is SWAT (StoryWorld Authoring Tool).

Let’s define some storyworld elements:

Element:	Examples:
Stage	Joe's Bar
Prop	whiskey bottle, chair
Actor	Tom, Mary, Fred
Verb	punch, cry
Event	Tom punch Fred

Notice that the elements in the left column are both capitalized and colored. Throughout this tutorial, a capitalized word has a precise meaning in the context of Storytronics. For example, an actor is a person who performs in plays or movies, but an Actor is an element of Storytronics that has a specific meaning. The colors applied to certain words and phrases will help you keep their qualities and functions straight later on.

The last element in this list, Event, is a special kind of Sentence. Events drive what happens in a storyworld. Notice that the example Event combines two Actors and a Verb.

"Event" and the rest of the elements listed in the left column are all classes of words in Sappho, the simplified language through which you'll tell the computer how to operate your storyworld. (See Chris's comments About Sappho.)

Sappho provides the grammar, you create the words. SWAT helps you put it all together.

Next tutorial: Getting Started: the Editors