Exploration of narrative in 3D

During the course of this class, we explored with a lot of tools and programs to generate text based narratives. In those narratives, we discover objects and space through text based description. I find that process very interesting and challenging. It is interesting because I can imagine the specifics, but challenging because it becomes difficult to keep track all of the connections in my mind. I found myself gravitate towards more visually represented tools, like ren’py because of that reason. Originally, I proposed to adapt a story I did in twine in ren’py. However, I looked more into more ways to produce a visual story. I wanted to explore narrative structure in Unity.

Unity is great for creating a 3d environment, but there is not a way to give narrative structure to all the interaction. I wanted to know if there are existing ways to integrate them.

My exploration started with trying to integrate twine stories into Unity. I found a plugin called Cradle, added it into Unity. Also, played a cradle game called snoozing. I found out it converts an existing twine story into Unity objects in a scene, rather than parsing the branching narrative logic in a twine story. I was hoping to add AR components to interact with the story, however, using Cradle would not be the best choice for it.

Here is a video of Cradle in Unity:

I spent more time looking into tools that would enable me to add story logic to Unity. I came cross a plugin called Fungus. The creator introduced it as being inspired by Twine and ren’py.

Also, I played one of the games that is made with Fungus, called Lieve Oma.

Fungus is what I was looking for adding story logic into unity. Once fungus is installed and imported, it offers a flowchart for the game logic and keeping track of variables. It is very simple to use and works well with Unity existing uses of the program UI.

With the time I have, I only implemented a scene of the storyline. It is the boy founding a dragon in his room.

Here is a link for download mac build of the first scene of the story. Boy and dragon scene one- right-click and save link as.