Welcome to Worddance

 Hello. C J here. I’m going to start this post with a sample of a story I’m working on.

    Summermoon was the city’s most celebrated holiday. Everything in the city was closed for it except some of the grocery stores. The day was an old Thandrian way of marking the Summer Solstice and it was sacred in the many religions that they brought over with them when they settled the city as one of the Three Peoples. The Three Peoples quickly took up the tradition even though the other two were human. The day was celebrated with decorations, grilled meat and gifts. The day after was always one of rest and contemplation, both by the rules of the Thandrian tradition and the city’s need to digest that much food. That left the question open though, what to do that day?
    Vaun was a silver draconian with a round nose and long, thick tail. His small horns were just visible above his dark hair. He had red stripes covering most of him. He had the best, or in some ways the worse, of a male chest and a female lower body.
    The air was hot and Ascala was alive with the sound of cicada and crickets chirping. The sun had just risen and the sky was full of pink and orange fire, flowing and coursing across the bright blue.
    He got up and considered getting dressed. No, he thought, food first.

This nice introduction might seem rather unique. At least, I hope it does. It isn’t though.

It’s been a thing I’ve been contemplating for a while, a question I’ve been working with. Computers can generate art and music through software. At the very least they can while guided or used by a human. Regardless of the merits or flaws of AI, a skilled computer user has ample tools at their disposal to make or to assist in making both art and music. The same cannot be said for storytelling through them or through plain text.

My game Uprising ultimately ran out of things I wanted to do with it but it did serve to prove a point, a point more about mathematics than about games. Uprising has small fragments of story on its cards and by playing them in the right order it can make a complete and well rounded narrative in text. Playing them in the right order would be fairly easy for a computer or a program to do but not really for a human using the game.

So I’m making that program. Welcome to my new storytelling project, Worddance. Here’s my goal. Make a program that can procedurally generate complete story text and narrative in a number of genres and lengths. This may sound impossible. It isn’t. Trust me. I’m good at mathematics. I’m better at storytelling. The previous story sample that begins this post was written out of pieces, modular pieces, that already are or were going to be on Uprising cards. Uprising would be hard to use and a piece of software doing the same job would be trivially easy so I’m going with the software option.

Worddance will span my setting and also any setting you want to add to it. Select or make characters using a simple menu. Choose who is in what story and in what role. Select a genre to pick between physical, social, or romance action. Give it a setting defined by story fragments about weather, locations and themes. Give it a list of goals and what moves or actions the characters know and use. Let it run and export you a .txt file containing anything from flash fiction to the next fantasy epic cycle.

It’s doable. I’m part way through planning it. I’ve looked into the code part of it and my usual go-to GDevelop will easily handle the job. GDevelop can also export directly to the Android Store. Good. I want this software for sale when it’s done and then I’ll keep adding things to it. I’ll probably roll it into Dragon Engine so it’s one price tag for the whole package deal. Dragon Engine could then use it to generate in-game books. I’m good at art but I’m better at storytelling. Time to put that to use.

C J Mcpherson