Domain Authoring Study

For my Ph.D. work I developed a method of summarizing clusters of stories (narrative plans), in order to help domain authors better understand what kinds of stories are possible. To evaluate the technique, I made a tool that allows people to configure a story world and explore it by clicking on clusters and reading example stories. You can try it yourself using this link:

https://code.rac7hel.com/domain-authoring-study-demo/

At the bottom of that page (after the Intro), you can toggle between the three different versions of the tool: The Circles and Tree versions each use a different type of cluster summary, and the Control version uses no summary.

The point of this is that it’s really difficult to anticipate exactly what stories are modeled by a narrative planning domain, even if you wrote it yourself! I asked people from all three groups whether or not specific stories were possible in the world they had just configured. My summary tools helped people answer these questions more accurately.

You can try this by clicking the “Answer 14 Questions” button at the bottom, once you’ve configured the world however you want it. After you answer all the questions, it will show you what percent you got right. (This is just for demo purposes; I’m not collecting any more data.)

Feedback and questions are always welcome. Thanks for visiting!

Comic Zoomer

A fun tool for reading comics 🙂 (This doesn’t work great on mobile, but it’s better if you’re in  landscape mode) Click on the comics to begin.

Writers’ Kitchen

by Caroline Catlett Gates

The Window Unit, Part 1

by Caroline Catlett Gates

Lumberjack Sarah vs Jackhammer Penny

by Caroline Catlett Gates
This one is longer and might take a minute to load. Wait for it!



Prisoners’ Dilemma – Predicting Choices

This story was designed for the experiment in this paper. I was trying to predict people’s choices at the end based on what they do in the beginning. It worked pretty well!

I built it with the Twine interactive fiction engine. The beautiful art was done by Caroline Catlett Gates. The ugly art was me 😉

Click here to play.

Honest Abe

Honest Abe is a 2D beat ’em up style game made with Unity by a team of 9 students in one semester. I was one of 6 developers and one of 4 game designers. As a developer I mainly worked on the enemy AI. There are three levels, several different kinds of baddies, three bosses, and even a perk system! All fully implemented… but I challenge you to even reach the final boss!

Best played with a mouse, not a trackpad. Unless you just want to die.