We had to table that part of the design for awhile, and I was wondering if anyone had made any progress in the meantime.

I'm afraid I haven't yet. I'm still really trying to get back into a development frame of mind.

My main interactive storytelling task over the last few months is to try and figure out a plan of the most sensible way to get there. I'm trying to determine a series of "baby steps" by figuring out a series of projects that gradually increase the level of interactive storytelling until I get the ultimate game that I want to create. Unfortunately with a team of just me and my present level of talent it's going to take me a long time to do [smile].

I'm interested in how everyone else is going as well.

http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/

This website has a lot of high-concept papers discussing various aspects of game design, interactivity, and narrative theory. They can get pretty dry but there are some interesting ideas.

Whoops; I should have posted this link earlier [smile].

For anyone interested in interactive storytelling, we had a great discussion on this topic a couple of months back in this thread here: " Automated storytelling and interactive plot in games" (sadly the thread is now defunct). I compiled a huge list of links at the start which should be a boon for anyone starting out.

I'm not working actively on the subject, although I continue in my quest to understand plot and how to generate it. Latest interesting and possibly useful bit of info:

Quote:

Sunandshadow Wrote: A plot outline can easily be built out of the following building blocks: Character A is in state J. Character A is impacted by action X Character A reacts, changing to state K. Character A takes action Y. Character B is in state P. Character B is impacted by action Y. Character B reacts, changing to state Q. Character B takes action Z. Character A is in state K. Character A is impacted by action Z. Etc. Note: - A character can be impacted by his/her own action or an outside action not performed by any of the characters such as a natural disaster. - Taking an action might mean chosing to do nothing as well as actually doing somthing. - A single action might affect more than one character.

I’m still doubtful that interactive story telling can be implement in any practical way beyond
Go to [argen] and [find] my [chicken] for me
Iv read some articles but none at low enough level to actually says how it overcomes the problems like the amount of material and logical rules for it you would have to somehow glue together to get anything beyond a random quest generator that doesn’t give impossible tasks or developments that just don’t make any sense.

I would suspect that interactive story telling could be generated in a similar way to how computers play chess. If you have two computer driven sides, each can look at their ways to advance their position similar to advancing chess pieces. Instead of directly affecting events though, the side asks a player to do something for them. Of couse this is far more complicated than chess but the same basic rules can be applied.

The problem with interactive storytelling is that you either need to model the AI of a lot of NPCs (which is impractical because it has a quickly-growing time complexity as you add more NPCs), or you have to model the heuristics of an author, which also requires a sophisticated AI.

Anything else will be way too rigid and the player will pick up on the 'pattern' after only a few stories.

How detailed is this interactive storytelling supposed to get?

Numerous sets of NPC groups with numerous NPC's each that have their own needs and goals which change based on player's actions. Interaction can come through combat, environment(e.g. steal something or destroy something they need), or speech (natural language processing, contextual response choices, or mere keywords).

Thats what I want and Im not giving up till I get it :P