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1 GRIMM: the choose your own story language Mike Lenner, Bill Liu, Mariya Nomanbhoy and Becky Plummer CS4115: Programming Languages and Translators 12/20/0421. Introduction The programming language GRIMM is designed to allow the user to easily create a “choose your own adventure” story for children. Although simple, the language is flexible and powerful enough to create complex, text-based adventure games. GRIMM is named in honor of the brothers Grimm, a pair of famous authors of children’s stories. Using GRIMM, the programmer is able to quickly and naturally create a story with characters, items, and choices for the player using the programmers own images. GRIMM allows the programmer to create a personalized story with an ending chosen by the child. The experience is interactive, making it much more engaging than reading a bedtime story. The child will have choices, and therefore will direct the progression of the story until they reach their own ending. The language is designed so that less technical users, such as parents and teachers, are able to quickly create programs and detailed stories even if they lack extensive programming experience. 1.1 Motivations GRIMM came out of our interest in creating a children's storytelling language, text-based game creation language, and FSM modeling language. We wanted to create a language that interested us and also allowed the programmers to create something unique, provide entertainment or educate the end user of the application. Combining these interests, it is easy to see how we arrived at a “choose your own adventure” storybook language. After researching the programming languages created by groups from previous years, we decided we wanted to create a language that allows the programmer to do something that is not already implemented in an existing language. Our language shares some features with the eMuse language. eMuse was designed to allow the programmer to create a screenplay and visualize it before getting actors involved. However, GRIMM allows the user to directly interact with the story in an open-ended, non-deterministic environment. Lastly, we wanted a language that would allow the user of a created application to be entertained or educated in some way. Initially, we considered implementing a tool that would help students in school by using our language to visualize a problem. However, the creation of a story would be entertaining for a child and inspire them to create their own stories. Therefore, this meets our two-fold objective: to entertain the child and expose them to programming while advancing their education by facilitating them to write their own stories. 1.2 Goals Inherent in the programming of all text based, role playing games are a number of common concepts. These include creating characters, items, and a space in which these characters and items exist. Using a non-domain specific language, such tasks are non-trivial. Our goal was to create a language with these constructs built in, allowing the programmer to concentrate on the creative aspects of building their adventure.3By taking advantage of the common software aspects of these items and locations, GRIMM requires the developer to merely specify a few details for each new entity they wish to introduce in their story. So, instead of wasting time writing code to implement a front door, the developer can create such an object quickly, then move on to determine what happens when the character passes through. GRIMM takes the developers focus away from the programming details, and puts it back to where it should lie, in the story. By doing so, the programmer can create a much richer and more intricate plot, making the adventure much more appealing. Additionally, GRIMM gives those unfamiliar with the aspects of programming an easy interface on which to create the stories they may dream up. 1.3 Features GRIMM: A simple, intuitive, flexible, object oriented, interactive, visual, fun language. Simple In order for teachers and parents to use the language it must be simple for them to learn and use. These types of people are busy enough without having to undertake learning a programming language, especially if they are not already involved in application development. Therefore we wanted to create a language that would be easy for non-technical people to understand and use. We are offering these people a language that does the image processing and placement, scene creation and movement, and choice implementation and execution without requiring the writer to know about the intricacies of programming. The keywords are straightforward and easy to recall and use. The language is also small and basic. The programmer can make the stories as simple or complex as they feel comfortable with by choosing how many scenes to have, how many objects to use, and how many options the user will have. Intuitive For non-technical people to use GRIMM it must loosely resemble English to make story-board creation intuitive. Languages such as C++ and Java are hard for non-technical people to understand because the syntax is unfamiliar. With GRIMM, users will understand the keywords and control structures because they will be described using English-based conventions. New story-board creators should be able to easily program-by-example by examining other stories. This will enable non-technical parents and teachers to quickly learn and start writing stories in GRIMM. Flexible There are many aspects to a story including: scenes, items, characters, descriptions, and open-ended choices. We allow the writer to completely create their own world within our framework. The writer can assign attributes to scenes, such as interesting characters and items. Additionally they can associate images with scenes that will be shown at runtime. This4allows the writer to create stories involving their own surroundings as well as make-believe items using basic predefined data types such as character, scene, and item. This flexibility allows there to be an endless number of possible stories with GRIMM. Object Oriented GRIMM has many objects, each with their own specific attributes. There are various basic data types that are used to describe a story. One example is a “scene”. Each scene must be created and then assigned values to its attributes such as name and description. We thought initially that non-technical people could be confused by the idea of
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