story map

Last time I talked about the syntax I'm using to write stuff. In this post I'll show some micro examples along with images of the story map representation.

Lets start with a basic example using the following source.

I guess you could say I was kinda *inspired* by Twine again. I couldn't think of a better way to represent the basic information of going between passages, so, what more can I say.


Moving on, here is an example using a display() passage. It works a lot like <<display>> would, basically adding one passage in it's place when evaluated at run time.

I use display() a lot, so I decided to highlight those passages in the map for faster recognition.


In this next example I use some implicit links and display()s.

They also got unique colors to help them stand out. I don't use them all of the time, but when I need them they are super helpful to have.


Now onto the world portion of things. This source code sets up a basic world structure with five different nouns and a couple verbs. Notice that a Start passage is still required since it is always the entry point of a game.

The nouns act kind of like a layer beneath passages. Each parent noun draws a white line to it's children. The green lines connect the actions on nouns to the passage responses of those actions. These links get pretty crowded, so I'm still not entirely happy with the way this is setup. For now though, it works.


Now an example with more stuff going on.

This time in Start I use control() to make the captain the player. With that set, the icon for the captain changes along with many of the other nouns. The treasure chest is taken by the captain at some point, so it gets represented as a pickup. All of the places where the captain moves get a container icon, since these locations could be rooms, vehicles or anything really. The Isle is still the default static icon because it never moves and never holds the player directly. Static objects are mostly useful for grouping nouns together, but don't need to serve any purpose in game. Finally the demon has the red dynamic icon since it does move around.

All of the little icons help add useful information that otherwise aren't represented in the source code.

Since this is all in the Scene view of the Unity editor I decided to add another perspective of the world to help understand what is going on.

From a top view we get a floor plan of the world at it's default state. It's much easier to see which object is inside of another this way. I've found that I don't need to make diagrams of this stuff anymore since it is easily represented here. The connecting lines are in the way in this image, but they can be toggled off.

And so that's the story map.