ISIS

english | 日本語

HowTo [ID# 62890]  +/-

Incredibly Simple Interactive Storytelling

SUMMER OF CODE 2007 PROJECT : designing an engine for adventure stories or interactive fiction authoring system for the XO. This should be a robust but simple system that will allow users to create their own adventure stories on the laptop. This project isn't based on Z-Machine, neither pure-text engine. The proposition is to allow children constructing IF games with media objects (images, videos, sounds) easily. The system has Python w/Pygame elements.

Design

ISIS design - here are the drafts from ISIS project.

Download

ISIS code is in constantly changing, so if you want to test the last version, you can download from GIT OLPC's repository:

git-clone git://dev.laptop.org/git/projects/games-misc/

If you prefer, here you can find some 'stable-test' tar versions:

• August 20th - Can be used to test chat, action and parser tools. Game UI is under development, so still not playable.

Development Tasks

These are the tasks/systems which ISIS will have, with (weight) and percentage of complete. I'll (try to) update percentages every end of the week (Thursday or Friday).

• (4) 80% - Parser system: this is probably the worst task to do, a little error there can be very hard to repair later. This read the script file, like script.isis, and construct the basic story game.

• (3) 90% - Action system: basic engine for story telling games, this handle actors, actions and game events. It's fully integrated with parser system.

• (2) 80% - Basic engine: almost done, stuffs like display, core and pygame event handler. Probably will have more to do when I work on UI and Media systems.

• (2) 80% - Chat system: store and handle chat possibilities and chat data (texts).

• (1) 90% - Database system: almost done, stores and load data from files.

• (3) 50% - Media system: can handle video, images and sound objects and associate them with basic game.

• (5) 00% - UI developing system: this will help children to create this game, with some GUI elements like showing possible actions to write on script, manipulating media with simple clicks (and associating them), and so on. This system will be probably made by "prototype" software engineer model, as only with children playing and testing this can being upgrade.

• (4) 40% - UI game system: I think will be easier than UI dev., this will do the interaction between XO and story written by a child, so this need to be very easy to use (possible without using mouse device, only the gamepad keys if it is possible)

• (5) 00% - Share system: This system isn't projected for the first stable release; this system turns possible to children develop and maybe play the games with mesh network.

Current tasks

I'm currently working on UI game system, doing:

• timer (controls objects changes along the time, using frames as counter)
• TextBox -- print letters, scrolling text, etc
• map -- a map on screen with objects. Render texts with squares or circles for objects without images.