ScriptEase II
ScriptEase II (SEII) is a program that allows video game designers to add scripts and conversations to their games without knowing how to code by using a graphical user interface. It can work with any game engine using a “translator.”
Find it on GitHub.
SEII was created by BELIEVE at the University of Alberta, a research group created to study believability in video games. The original ScriptEase only worked with the Neverwinter Nights Aurora toolkit, which was used to teach the CMPUT 250: Computers and Games course.
I wrote the first Unity3D translator. SEII was always designed with interoperability in mind, but it wasn’t actually tested. The Unity3D translator worked as a proof of concept, and was used with other BELIEVE projects.
I also worked on the conversation editor and story graph which went beyond simple “if/then” type visual scripting to create a system to keep track of conversations and stories in games. This led to the discovery that SEII was slowly corrupting the Neverwtiner Nights files. I remember racing to fix this before we released the beta to students, reverse-engineering the SEII-generated, SE-generated, and Aurora-generated game files to find out what part of the bytecode was generating incorrectly.
I co-authored a proceedings paper published at the Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) in 2013, which can be read here. I also presented it as a research poster at the 2013 GRAND-NCE Conference in Toronto, and at a 2013 GRAND Digital Wave Workshop in Calgary.