Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, Second Edition

Chapter 19. Engines

The Heart of Every Interactive storytelling technology is the engine. This is the software that figures out how the storyworld responds to the actions of a player. A perfect engine would permit every possible device that a storyteller might want to deploy, but such an engine would be horrendously complicated. Your task is to devise an engine that’s simple enough to be manageable, yet powerful enough to meet the demands of the storyworld authors.

Event-Based Engines

The simplest engine relies exclusively on the connections between events to make its decisions. Branching trees use such engines (see Chapter 8). The player triggers an event, which then presents the player with a choice between several new events. The player selects ...