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Story Graph concept refactor
The reason we are redefining our concept is that by having just a graph with nodes and links it would require a lot of effort from the side of the storyteller in order to learn how to use the system. Not only that but there could be multiple ways in order to model a story and in lots of them it could go wrong.
The goal of this document is to think of a way to limit the storyteller to work with the graph editor in a mode which makes it easy for him to bootstrap a new project and avoid common pitfalls when modelling a story.
The idea behind this is that with the current design the weenies would be dispersed randomly in space and it would be hard for the storyteller to track locations and visualise the story.
The solution is to have a map in the background and have each weenie positioned where it should be within each state of the story.
We shouldn't limit the storyteller to just a set of assets. He should be able to model the world.
A possible way to do this is by adopting the use of map brushes. Also we should think of a way to put in specific objects like buildings and the like.
Maps could be split up into sections with names of their own.
Most of the writers would want a quickstart. The idea is to provide a marketplace for already built map assets where storytellers should able to push their own maps. (We could potentially think about paid maps???)
Having in mind that weenies have positions and positions could be interpolated we could introduce a feature that makes our story get alive by playing the main events.
The current concept lacks a lot of precision and is one of the things causing a lot of confusion. For example with what we have now a completely valid relations could be - Weenie A loves, Weenie B but Weenie B is far in the lands of Mordor, they haven't seen one another in quite a while, etc... This leaves a lot of freedom.
Relations should represent only discrete values that could be ordered and we could be having different relation types for different sets of discrete values.
In such terms I would propose having default relations for the most generic such set of values - love, friendship, neutrality, hatred. Relations for those values could be filtered by the value (for example search only for weenies that love one another). Heard of rainbows? Now prepare for relationsbows -> we could have a colour gradient for the different values.
Another freedom problem is that on a new event we rely mainly on the description of the weenie, thus making it hard for the author to track what has happened. What I suggest is:
- in order for one weenie to participate in an event it should have an
event actiondescribing what it is doing during the event. - introducing weenie activities for the time gaps between events describing what weenies are doing then.
- liveness - a set of discrete values describing how healthy the weenie is. Possible values are - healthy, unhealthy, dead.
It would be good to have a mode where all the weenies could be seen and edited from. We could even introduce weenie assets (sets of weenies that could be obtained from the marketplace just like maps).