Façade - An interactive drama

Many modern games suffer from a trade-off between the degree of interactivity and the dramatic quality of the story. In Facade, an interactive drama system, the player can use natural language input and physical actions to find his way through a domestic quarrel of a couple s/he is friends with. To achieve interactivity and flexibility, the story is structured as a set of beats. Beats are short situations programmed in a special purpose language called ABL that is based on Hap . The selection of a small subset of all beats used in any run through the game depends both on the user’s actions and the desired story tension arc. This leads to a user experience which is both highly sensitive to the players actions and coherently forms an exciting story.