And We're Back!

I've been back at Penn for less than a week now, but it's time to get back into the project. Unfortunately, there have been a few setbacks I need to take care of this week before I can keep moving forward. First off, my PC required me to upgrade to Windows 8 (it had come preinstalled with a demo, which expired), and I lost all of my programs. I'm going to need to spend a bit of time reinstalling Visual Studio, Unity, and a bunch of other programs I was using. Luckily, all of the actual code I wrote from last semester is still intact. Unfortunately, I noticed a bug in the code that I haven't been able to trace yet. Specifically, when I put in the "compliment" action, I can somehow cause an infinite loop. No other actions that I've drafted or experimented with seem to have this effect on my code.

The next steps for me seem pretty clear. Once I've reinstalled Unity, I need to find a way to show what my program is doing visually. The next step after that (or maybe a simultaneous step) is fine tuning the storytelling AI. I devised the system for that in past blog posts, and started implementation of it before the vacation.

Finally, I need to start designing a game application for the system I've developed. In a conversation with Aline and Norm at the end of last semester, we decided that since my system was being developed for use in video games, it would make sense to show it off in a game scenario. I haven't decided what the ideal way to do that would be just yet. Right now the plan is for a "Murder on the Orient Express" style close quarters murder mystery game. The player is stuck on a "train" (or other enclosed space) with other characters. The first act the player interacts with the other characters and gets to know them. The second act is triggered by a murder (perhaps unintentionally set off by the player character), and involves the investigation. The third act is triggered by either another murder or the murderer being discovered. In certain ways, though, this doesn't seem groundbreaking in terms of game design. What I really want to do is, using action importance values where 5 means the next phase of the story is triggered, allow for an expanding number of plot points to push the story forward. At first the only AIV 5 are "murder" and "is arrested", but we could keep adding more actions of increasing absurdity (like "jump off the train" or even "get abducted by aliens") that are triggered by specific scenarios and move the story forward in different ways, seriously expanding the number of ways in which the game's story can be experienced.

The goal for next week is to have all of my applications reinstalled, to have AIV and the storytelling AI complete and functioning properly, and to have started on the Unity based graphics representation of my storytelling program.