The Future Has a History.
Narrative Design · World States · Causal Forecasting
In ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian Edubba — the House of Tablets — was a place where scribes learned to record, organize, and preserve knowledge.
EDUBBA takes its name from that tradition.
It is a native desktop application under active development, designed to help narrative directors, writers, and development teams understand the structures, relationships, and consequences underlying interactive stories.
Interactive narratives become increasingly complex as their worlds develop.
Characters change. Relationships evolve. Player decisions create new possibilities while closing others. Events depend on histories that may have developed through dozens or hundreds of different routes.
A seemingly straightforward change to a quest in Act Two can introduce contradictions or invalidate narrative dependencies throughout Act Three.
These problems are difficult to identify when narrative structure, world definitions, and gameplay-state requirements are scattered across documents, spreadsheets, and disconnected tools.
EDUBBA is being developed to make those dependencies visible throughout the development process.
Its purpose is to help teams investigate what is possible, identify contradictions, understand the impact of proposed changes, and make informed creative decisions before those changes become expensive production problems.
EDUBBA is not a game engine or a dialogue-writing tool. It is a design-time environment for modelling and evaluating the causal structure of interactive narratives.
The production problems, narrative continuity failures, and practical experiences informing the project.
An introduction to Beats, Bridges, Master Data, narrative and gameplay state, and the planned causal evaluation capabilities.
Illustrated examples showing how established narrative structures can be represented and investigated within EDUBBA.
A continuing record of the application's development, architectural decisions, experiments, and progress.
Project Status: Active development
Project Website: https://edubbadev.cloud
Development Repository: https://github.com/TwistyRoads/EDUBBA_Narrative_Designer
The writer creates the world and its rules; EDUBBA helps explore the stories that world can support.