Author assistance visualizations for Ice-Bound, a combinatorial narrative

As games increase in narrative complexity, challenges mount for their story designers. As authors, these designers are concerned with building an experience that responds to players in consistent and engaging ways, even when players make unpredictable story choices amongst a large group of options. Furthermore, they want those choices to have narrative impact. However, historically the task of authoring such narratives can prove daunting or infeasible. One approach to solving this problem is to use external tools to visualize story structure. This paper introduces a new set of design-time visualizations for combinatorial interactive narrative authoring. By using these visualizations during the creation of Ice-Bound (an interactive narrative iPad game) we were able to author content within a large combinatorial possibility space, and achieve both desired player freedom and content responsiveness. This generalized visualization strategy could also prove useful to future interactive narratives using combinatorial approaches.