Contemporary Issues in Interactive Storytelling Authoring Systems

Authoring tools for interactive narrative abstract underlying data models to allow authors to write creative works. Understanding how our program and interface design decisions alter the User Experience design could lead to more robust authoring experiences. We contribute a taxonomy of authoring tools with identified program and User Experience observations with discussion into their impact on the authoring experience as well as reflection on two detailed experiments. We then present our own authoring tool, Novella, and discuss how it has implemented the lessons learned from the analysis and how it approaches solving the identified challenges.