Last time I said when I come back, I’ll have a solution for frames, split decisions and overall storyflow in Storytime. Was I successful? … I think so?

There has been a key piece missing from Storytime. The goals have been clear and so far, things have been progressing great but there was a murky mysteriousness about how all the goals merge together into one cohesive package. “Fun”. “Inutative”. “Simple”. Broad statements on the surface but the driving force at the heart of Storytime. Every idea, solution and/or experience within Storytime has to meet these three pillars.

So how did I crack branching storylines in Storytime? Technically, I haven’t. But I have. But I haven’t. Bare with me as I explain.

If you’ve been tracking the progress of the project thus far, you may have noticed I’ve been using “bubbles” to communicate actions to the user (I did mention that, didn’t I? I hope I did!). The idea behind the bubbles stems from the want to make this more of a game than a tool. It should be fun to use the interface of Storytime. We’re not building a “boring” tool like Twine or Articy;Draft - we’re building a fun experience to have fun creating stories.

The bubbles react to the user at every opportunity - when they hover over them, click them, can’t click them but click anyway - each interaction made the bubble do something. An example of this is a little man inside a bubble that represents the “character” menu. If the user is not interacting with the bubble, he stands at attention, alert and ready - sometimes falling asleep bored. When the user hovers over the man, he springs to life and gives the user an excited wave. Clicking on him makes him react as if you have poked the little stick man. If the button is set to be disabled, the little man heads to bed with a conveniently placed lamp beside him. If the user clicks the disabled the button, the lamp turns on, waking the stick man and forcing the stick man to turn the light off again. Doing so multiple times makes the stick man very angry indeed!

Adding that kind of flair and fun made the experience enjoyable if not slightly tedious - where sometimes immediacy and responsiveness took a back seat for a visual gag. But the seed was there. How can I have my cake and eat it - where it is fun but we don’t get in the way of the user getting something done?

I had been spitballing potential solutions to this problem (and how branching scenes .etc) for quite a while to no avail. Every solution I came up with was an attempt to be additive to the bubbles but they all just added more and more bloat to the system, making the issue of lack of immediacy and responsiveness even worse with each incarnation.

It was at this point my partner saw what I was doing and offered a completely fresh perspective I had not even considered - what if the interface was diagetic?

For those who don’t know what diagetic means, at a glance means that the thing exists within the fictional world itself. Think of music coming through a radio in-game. That’s diagetic audio as it exists within the physical fictional world. Now imagine that but for UI. Instead of buttons on your screen, think of items in the world that you can click to perform the functions. An example of this would be an eraser that when clicked, undoes the previous command you made. A-Ha! Lightbulb moment!

After this, it all fell into place. Gone were the bubbles, instead we’re now in a 3D world looking upon a table. An art station, with stickers, erasers, pens and rulers. This is the gamification the tool needed - this is how we build a strong foundation for those three pillars of Storytime.

The revelations filtered out from there. How do I show scene progression? They’re cards on a physical board! How do we show what effect is applied to a scene? With a sticker in the corner that the user can peel off if they no longer want the effect.

Don’t get me wrong, a move to an almost fully diagetic UX like this is a huge, traumatic change to a game like this. But it’s totally the right call. How do you make a tool not a tool? By turning it into a game and throwing out the pieces that make it feel like a chore to use. This isn’t some boring document creator, this is is a fun story creating experience where you manually put the pieces together yourself to tell your story! It’s exactly what Storytime set out to be.

So that’s where I am at now. I have been on a diagetic conversion spree, removing bubbles and replacing them with stationary and bringing the world of Storytime to life. I haven’t quite got to the frame progression stuff just yet but it’s next on the list. With a rock solid foundation like this, I no longer fear the task of building such complex systems - I can see them as clear as day in my mind.

Until next time, as always, thanks for reading and good morning, evening, noon or night, or whatever it is where you are and I’ll see you in the next post.

Cheers, Midafir.

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