Script for The Swallows of Summer

[robsimmons]

My nanogenmo submission with @chrisamaphone is based off of our ProcJam submission, which procedurally generates interaction-based stories every hour using the logic programming language Celf and then turns them into twine "performances" which can be experienced by the user. More explanation of how this works is at http://play.typesafety.net.

One of our examples was a straightforward encoding of most of the story-world from The Swallows of Summer by @catseye. This example turned out to be one of our consistently largest stories. We kept hoping it would procedurally generate a 50000-word twee file (which has the role of "the script," which is close enough to a novel that we hoped it would count). It never quite got there, tantalizingly producing a 48,000 word script twice.

So, this being the last day in the month, we forced the issue, adding two new characters, Mallory and Nero, into Alice and Bob's little world and tweaking the win condition just a bit so that stories tended to run on longer. The modified version was checked in at https://github.com/chrisamaphone/procjam2014/tree/4fb5effed3cfa32a4da51a8850c622dbbdf91042 and used seed 201433421.

Story skeleton produced by Celf: http://play.typesafety.net/swallows-nanogenmo2014/swallows.out
Twee script (~80000 words, some of it is CSS though so the buffer is good): http://play.typesafety.net/swallows-nanogenmo2014/swallows.tw
Twine production: http://play.typesafety.net/swallows-nanogenmo2014

[cpressey]

TBH, I'm not entirely certain what you've done here, because at a first glance, it looks like you've taken The Swallows of Summer and added Repetitive Strain Injury, although I suspect this is not how you'd describe what you've done, but at any rate I'm flattered, and kudos for submitting a generator which generates a generator based on a generated novel!

[robsimmons]

Glad you enjoyed it... to some degree.

Your description is not un-apt, in terms of story structure I tried to port Swallows as directly as I could into our framework... but Twine programs made of 10-word passages and based on 50,000 word Twee sourcefiles make even less sense than 50,000 word novels.

[chrisamaphone]

Yeah, I'd say the actual "novel" we're submitting here is the Twee (.tw) file, not the Twine game -- not that it's any more pleasant of a thing to inspect. I'd say the main thing we did atop your work was make the underlying world model (and nonlinearity of the narrative) more apparent/explicit in the artifact. This is not to say it's an improvement, just another weird artifact extracted from the same underlying concept. :)

[cpressey]

Don't get me wrong, I don't see the addition of RSI to a novel as a negative thing, necessarily. Hey, my brain has been freshly broken at least four times today from the deluge of last-minute submissions in my inbox, so why not give my wrist a chance too?

The ambiguity of what's "actually" the generator and what's "actually" the novel is actually kind of nice too.

The next logical step: scrape the game page in PhantomJS or something to re-create a linear text from it...