April Grow

A compiler for 3D machine knitting

Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a heuristic transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which we prove is both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend.

SpyFeet: an exercise RPG

One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make significant and desired choices in a large, complex, and story-rich environment. Giving players meaningful choice has traditionally required the creation of tremendous amounts of hand-authored story content. This authoring paradigm tends to introduce both structural and workload problems for RPG designers. Our hypothesis is that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, both requiring advancement in three distinct areas: (1) dynamic story management architecture that allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices; (2) dynamic dialogue generation which takes history and relationships into account; and (3) an authoring interface that lets writers focus on quests and characters. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.

Threadsteading : Playful Interaction for Textile Fabrication Devices

Our interaction -- Threadsteading -- combines game design practices, traditional crafting techniques of quilting and embroidery, and existing fabrication technologies to produce an innovative game experience that results in a tangible artifact at the end of play. Threadsteading offers a glimpse at a future in which humans can engage in realtime, playful interaction with fabrication machines.

The design of Mismanor: creating a playable quest-based story game

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on players traits and the social state of the game world.

Extending CRPGs as an interactive storytelling form

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack a density of interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. We have identified two main components of player interaction within the story--quests and character interaction--to address in a new playable experience, Mismanor. In this paper we focus on the character interaction aspect. In particular, it describes how we use the Comme il Faut system to support emergent social interactions between the player and the game characters based on players traits and the social state of the game world. We discuss the design and creation of the game as well as the modifications to the systems required to support this new CRPG experience.