hypertale

hypertale is a toolkit for developing software for interactive storytelling and games

Welcome to the hypertale web site.

Hypertale is a toolkit for creating systems for interactive storytelling. At this point (early 2006) it does not yet exist.

Interactive stories

If you've ever played a computer adventure game (also known as interactive fiction, IF) or computer role-playing game (CRPG) you know that the story typically progresses by solving a series of "quests". The simplest way of doing this is simply putting a lot of puzzles that lead to each other and have the player figure them out one after the other. Many of us feel it should be possible to do more. In many games this is done by adding a number of alternative solutions to quests, or subquests that can be solved in any order. Authoring these kinds of stories, or rather webs of stories, is difficult.

This project is about those kind of intricately linked networks of stories. The goal is to build both an authoring environment for the stories and a kind of interaction engine that "runs" the stories. The idea is not really to build a finished game, but rather to build the part of a game that handles the story. So hypertale will be a framework for insteractive storylines that can be used by others building CRPGs, adventure games, mixed reality (physical and virtual) interactive environments, interactive novels, etc.

It's stilly pretty unsure what direction this project is going to take, but the ambition is to look more at the dramatic qualities of interactive narratives rather than, say, scalability issues of MMORPG:s.

Do you mean a branching narrative? A simulation?

Well, no. Not really. One of the simplest approaches to interactive storytelling is the "branching narratives" as used by Create Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series of children's books. Hypertale allows more complex things than that. Another extreme is basically adding a lot of values and behaviors to the characters and objects in the game world so that the story will sort of generate itself from these (and if you're really lucky, some really interesting variations can emerge from the mix). That's not really the idea either. Hypertale is, at least initially, more about writing patches of stories that will trigger on different events and on each other.

Well, where's the code?

I have every intention of posting the code here at sourceforge when there is anything worth publishing. At this point it is way too early in the process to post anything.

Why is there a home page if there is no code?

Well, since you're reading this, you found it, and that's the point. You know now that somebody is working on this. My hope is that somebody will find it interesting and want to join in.

How do I join up?

At this time, e-mail me and we can talk. I'm looking for anybody interested in interactive storytelling, game design, or if you're just a coder looking for something to do.

- Fredrik Petersson, Jan. 2006