Turn Your Writers Into Programmers: Greyboxing Narrative with Story Languages

In this 2021 Game Narrative Summit session, Secret Lab’s Jon Manning and Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North explore how to build systems for faster, reactive, and more sustainable narrative development.
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[@GonziHere]

The talk and the contents are good, but let me give a shout out to your back and forth presentation. That was actually really impressive.

[@Bashar3A]

Second that!

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

did they greybox it in advance

[@evanlane1690]

Inkle Studios: "AM I A JOKE TO YOU?!" Seriously though, great talk guys. Thanks!

[@SuperShortAndSweet]

Do you look down on me because I'm youger

[@chincotaco]

I absolutely love this. Such a productive, writer-driven workflow unlocked by just little DSL implemented in ANTLR, feeding AST nodes into the game engine? Great work.

[@tykenngamelab]

I wish I had known about Yarn Spinner sooner, because it looks like exactly what I had been building for my own project, but better. I tried it out immediately after watching this, and I think I'm going to switch my project to it. Thanks!

[@uniworkhorse]

The flow of this presentation was amazing! Hope that more people can find this talk that need it - I don't understand half the stuff going on, but man are these gents excited about the tools they've made! Always cool to see the way the sausage gets made.

[@AssasinZorro]

This talk is very well prepared. They say so much in so little time. It's amazing

[@ShinySarah44]

This was incredibly interesting; I'm very new to figuring out game making as a hobby. I have been focusing on learning coding / programs before thinking about writing and story telling (as that tends to have a right and wrong solution, while writing is more ambiguous). But this was a very cool bridge. Plus it's always great hearing Australian voices on these topics. The format was great too; throwing back and forth between perspectives. Lots of fun and I feel I'll be referring back to this in the future.

[@dbroche]

This presi lights up my brain in so many ways! Makes me want to shake off the dust of an old screenplay and convert it into a game :)

[@ironyelegy]

i literally didn't recognize north. thanks for the talk, very useful for visual novels or rpgs i can imagine. text adventure script.

[@uniworkhorse]

Didn't even think about the challenge writers would be facing stepping into the gaming space - makes me really appreciate the passion that goes into games as always...

[@noodle-eater]

This is awesome, great talk. I once develop a small markdown-like interpreter to help draw text in the engine editor, that was a lot of fun. I thought that the interpreter is not really much used but this talk encourage me to learn more and make more tools. Thank you :)

[@DarnMyNameDoesntFi]

Wonderful presentation for a really cool tool. Thanks

[@Bashar3A]

Really great talk, great syncing between you too. I will def try Yarn Spinner. I also ended up adding few games from the talk to my wishlist XD

[@MrKlimcio]

Ryan looks like Charles Dance... or only I have that vibe?

[@MattiaBelletti]

How does this compare to Inkle's language, Ink? It seems they cover very similar grounds.

[@OmnomnomPancake]

Very informative, thank you!

[@fal_pal_]

Seems like Twine has been preparing me for this and I never had a clue!

[@JoanLamrack]

Thanks for sharing!

[@RedMartyrEntertainment]

We've used Articy Draft 3 along with Unity (created a custom framework to be able to read the data from Articy, which includes dialogs, gameplay scripting, items, voice overs, tasks...). It's fine, but it has its downsides. To name just a few: exporting from Articy and importing to Unity takes time no matter how powerful your PC is, localization is horrible in Articy, managing voice overs is a complete nightmare.

[@noejacques]

Very nice talk !

[@DanielGuajardo]

OK, I'm a writer and this presentation gave me so many hopes… but I'm not a programmer, so I looked around. And found out that if I'm not a programmer or don't work with one, I can't debug a dime. I have the VS Code extension. I also wrote some branching dialogue. But can't see it at work. Is there a debug machine for Yarn Spinner's lone writers?

[@IvanDCosta12]

Thankyou

[@filipemecenas]

Thats awesome , i dont know code or writing ... But this looks super cool

[@Brainstrain]

Ryan’s jokes are all in Ryanisms, actually?!

[@mycollegeshirt]

fantastic

[@RoamingAdhocrat]

Yay Tasmania!

[@qingluwu1441]

Nice

[@marcar365]

Nice 🎉🎉 Thanks for sharing! can you guys make a stand alone, like Twine?

[@JayTohab]

Me, who copies/pastes from Freeplane into Twine: 💀

[@workingdemofirsttime4838]

I guess nobodies heard of renpy then ;)

[@dovedozen]

I know, right... I guess it's maybe kind of a niche tool when it comes to the "professional game dev" circle, but I clicked on this video in the first place because I'M a writer who became a programmer by messing with ren'py and the ability to program REALLY opens up amazing new avenues for what all you can write into a VN. I definitely recognize the same basic principles here, though; just scaled-up a little.

[@JHYAMATOGAMING]

Do you guys know about a game called BATTLE OF WARSHIPS Naval Blitz ?