Crafting Interactive Narratives With Consequences: Build Your Own System For Fun And Profit

Crafting Interactive Narratives With Consequences: Build Your Own System For Fun And Profit is a talk currently scheduled to appear at IndieCade 2017.

Summary
Aimed at intermediate narrative developers, I'll briefly talk about several methods for crafting narratives that respond to player choice: branch-and-bottleneck, quality-based narrative, waypoint narrative, and salience-based narrative (the latter two being terms Emily Short has coined to describe two very useful types of systems). The talk will lay out the benefits of each type, how to implement a basic quality-based narrative, and how to fit a narrative system to a particular type of story you're trying to tell. I'll show examples from my own work of each kind, and answer questions from audience members about how they can build their own in systems like Twine, Choicescript, and Ink.