Introducing Elm Story - a new tool to visually compose and publish interactive storyworlds

HanonO · December 25, 2021, 3:21pm

The other thing I noticed - I tried to create a character/persona in 0.6 and couldn’t find a way to upload an image. Is that functionality just not in the release yet? (Running MacOS).

And I really appreciate the smaller persona images, and being able to see a few lines of the event content in the map, that is really helpful!

sith · December 25, 2021, 5:19pm

Hi Hanon, thank you!

To upload a character image, you have to go to the personality tab, right click on a mask and select change

sith · January 10, 2022, 11:33pm

Hi everyone! I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you that the development of Elm Story is advancing well also thanks to your feedback. We are planning to release the 0.7 update at the end of next week. It will include multimedia/text styling support and overall experience enhancement

I also wanted share with you my revisited Interactive Fiction The Masque of The Red Death, based on Poe’s homonymous work.
I have recreated the storyworld within Elm Story and will update it with each release so that it becomes an evolving artefact showing the latest features of the tool.

Link: The Masque of the Red Death

sith · January 26, 2022, 11:38am

Hi all - Given the complexity of new features coming to the event content editor and a new asset manager that wasn’t originally scoped, the 0.7 multimedia update is taking longer than expected.

New estimate is Jan 31st. Apologies for the delay…

In the meantime, we leave you with a preview of the new Scene Map, which shows how secondary characters mentioned in an event are displayed

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You can always join us on our Discord community to report feedback and discuss Elm Story

sith · February 6, 2022, 10:46pm

The 0.7 multimedia release is huge and needs more time to bake.
Thank you for your patience as we polish everything up. In the meantime, here’s an updated peak at the composer with full content previews!

Join us on Discord: http://discord.gg/v897evyc4Q

HanonO · May 7, 2022, 5:37am

Adventures in Elm Story:

sith · May 8, 2022, 10:53am

OOOH, that sounds great. Keep up the good work, we can’t wait to see what the finished result looks like.

HanonO · July 8, 2022, 3:31am

One neat thing about Elm Story is whimsical dummy template content such as storylet and variable names which can be left as-is to differentiate, or selectively renamed for organization. It’s easy to map out the structure of a scene visually and then write the prose in later.

I also enjoy that creating a node and a choice with multiple paths out will select one of them randomly, or the paths can be weighted with variables. Also any node with no path or choice out or marked as a game-end will automatically include a link back to an individual scene’s opening node. If you conceive your choice-narrative as hub and spoke, this all makes sense and is well-appreciated!

chilli · May 16, 2023, 10:42am

Gutted to see this cancelled. May I ask why you had to do that? It looked full of promise.

jkj_yuio · May 16, 2023, 10:57am

A shame indeed. This looked very much a free (or cheaper) version of arcweave. I think all it needed was a half-decent scripting system added.

HanonO · May 16, 2023, 7:31pm

I’m sad about Elm Story’s cancellation also. It’s technically “open source” now but I get the feeling from the final blog post that there was some friction happening and it may not go anywhere else.

I tried to use Es in it’s current state and it works but the IDE was a bit crashy on OSX at least (you had to know the secret “ctrl-R to restart” command and it usually had all your work but you’d have to restart often while working.)

I also noticed if you had a really busy scene with lots happening stuff started to lag and not draw in the IDE. Once you got to compile, the resulting file worked just fine though. I found myself just granularly breaking scenes into smaller individual “processes” instead of an entire narrative segment or a room in one scene the way authors might normally split up their narrative when given something called “scenes”.

What I liked:

Amazing interface for creating a story (like ArcWeave as mentioned).
Very optimized for mobile play.
Pretty incredible “character” interface where you could implement multiple portraits with mood-changes you could display next to specified passages such as for dialogue. It appeared they also were going to have a way to automate “mood swings” and display mood-versions of character portraits on the fly based on traits.
Dead-end passages would by default link back to the first passage in a scene, great for constructing “examine” messages or grinding hubs.
A choice in one passage could split to multiple passages, and the game would select one randomly, or the author could “weight” passages with conditions, so it’d choose between specific passages that required a variable first, or unweighted default passage(s) if the player didn’t qualify.
Mostly-well implemented multimedia audio and graphics (though they also needed some tweaking) - you could have BGM and per-passage sounds that played simultaneously, and Es would “duck” the music volume if a sound played temporarily.

What I didn’t like:

No easy way to do text randomization/variation, which is really helpful for a QBN where you hit lots of repeated passages and hubs over and over and might want to vary text based on how close the player is to finishing a “Grandfather Clock” grind or similar. I experimented with the structural “this passage can lead to any of these three passages” but doing that caused very busy and cluttered scenes that led to IDE slowdown and crashing.
No way to generate a random number, or roll a die, so no “chance to succeed” type of choices.
Variables had to be hard-generated and assigned a type for use - not a bad thing for consistency but sort of throws a wet blanket on the capricious fun of atmosphere messages or having the game remember on-the-fly detail about what a player has chosen and done. You had to plan in advance how many variables you need and exactly what they do - I know some systems are like this, but I love setting lots of flags based on character choices, or “did the player already read this long description? If so, I’ll provide a summary next…” types of situations.
No way to control audio volume, or have BGM continue between two scenes - if two scenes had the same music and you switched from one to the other, the track would start over since entering a new scene always cued it’s music track. No way to change atmosphere audio or BGM within a scene. You could have background music play and then have a “forest birds” sound effect set to play in a passage, but it would stop upon exiting the passage. (Untested, but I found myself “uploading” the same sounds and tracks to re-use them, and I believe it was storing multiple copies of the same track instead of having an audio library it could pull from since I noticed the file size getting way huge for the tiny test games I did, and I believe it’s because I had a full MP3 track uploaded multiple times for scenes with the same music.)

ResidentReader · May 29, 2023, 4:08am

If you don’t mind me asking, where did you get the open source version from? I’d love to know where to download it

HanonO · May 29, 2023, 3:26pm

I believe there are issues behind the scenes. It appears the itch page has been removed…and I’ve been dealing with messages here that have been taken down and removed. Which is a little annoying. I even donated a bit to them. So perhaps it’s no longer an open source project.

JoshGrams · May 30, 2023, 1:52am

Oh geez. Very mature. Well, I still have the latest build (only the Windows version), and a copy of the source repository, and it’s GPLv3 so I could perfectly legally post both somewhere… I haven’t looked into what it would take to build it for other platforms (were there releases for other platforms?)

pinkunz · May 30, 2023, 2:02am

Project Elm Story: Salvation

JoshGrams · May 30, 2023, 2:24am

Oh, I’m not going to work on it. But IIRC it was fairly usable as-is (as-was?) so here’s the code and the one installer that I had. GitHub - JoshuaGrams/elm-story: Archive of Elm Story narrative tool

pinkunz · May 30, 2023, 2:26am

Just poking some fun; wasn’t suggesting you should literally jump in and take over.

JoshGrams · June 1, 2023, 9:45pm

Ha, let’s hear it for the IF community. Got the Mac and Linux builds from people who still had downloads. So if you’ve spent the last couple years not trying Elm Story and now for some reason you suddenly want to, I added them to the release page.

Sanadi · June 2, 2023, 11:15am

The only Elm related interactive fiction thing I could find was the Elm Narrative Engine. I’m not sure it’s related or something entirely different though.

Seems I overlooked it .Thanks for clearing that up.

Pebblerubble · June 2, 2023, 11:33am

No, the Elm Narrative Engine is unrelated to the dead project Elm Story. See earlier in this thread:

Edit: I see it’s been revived! Great!