Open sourcing the Technology
Siboot is the first step in a plan to kickstart an interactive storytelling industry. Siboot will demonstrate the efficacy of the technology we have developed for interactive storytelling — we will ultimately give away.
I won’t bore you with the twenty-year history of how I developed this technology, and the many sucesses and failures along that path. The technology reached its culmination with a development environment (a program for creating programs) that we called the StoryWorld Authoring Tool: SWAT. It’s huge and complicated, so huge and so complicated that people couldn’t master it. It could do fantastic things, but only if you could juggle lots of mental balls at once.
For Siboot, I stripped away half of the complexity in SWAT. If the Siboot project succeeds in exciting interest in the technology, we will set to work cleaning up SWAT, simplifying it and making it easier to use. We’ll release it — for free — when it is ready for use by indies.
We’ll release the technology in stages. At first we’ll release only the end program, not the source code. We’ll give the community time to play with and learn the technology. We’ll probably need to make lots of improvements at first.
Once we’ve gotten the technology working adequately, we’ll set to work cleaning up and documenting all the source code, then release it as open source.
