Perhaps you have noticed that Storytron seems to be suffering from a bad case of the vapors. Our very first business plan called for us to publicly launch everything on January 1st, 2008. That didn’t happen. We pushed the launch date back to March 15th. But in early March I ran a playtest that convinced me that the Deikto interface was unacceptably obtuse. So I went back to the drawing board — and we pushed back the launch date to May 15th. I forget why we pushed it back from there, but I do recall that the next delay came when our alpha testing of Balance of Power 21st Century revealed many problems. So once again I went back to the drawing board and came up with major changes to the storyworld.

During all this time we had other difficulties: I had surgery that proved to be disabling for longer than I had expected. One of our programmers was human enough to take a vacation. I wasted two weeks on a trip to two conferences.

And despite the fact that our official launch date has been pushed back repeatedly, our progress has been relentless. We require five main pieces of software to launch Storytron:

1. Swat, the editing tool. Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but Swat has changed very little in the last six weeks. That’s because it’s in great shape. Facundo and Louis continue to work on it feverishly, but the work they’re doing has all been concerned with improving efficiency and security, and ferreting out tiny bugs that haven’t been reported by the users. It’s really reassuring when the programmers find the bugs before the users do.

2. Storyteller, the program you use to play a storyworld with. This too has been stable for about eight weeks. Again, the only changes on it have involved efficiency and security. It appears to be very solid now.

3. The website. The Storytron website has quite a few special capabilities that require some custom programming. There’s nothing earth-shattering, to be sure, but it is not a collection of HTML pages. There’s a lot more going on underneath the hood. Louis has been doing lots of coding to make all this work properly, and Pati and Laura have been deeply involved in organizing the overall effort.

4. The reference material and tutorials. This pile is huge. Worse, the technology it explains has been constantly changing. We made changes in April and May that required Pati to completely rewrite large portions of the tutorials. All in all, the content of the materials on the website adds up to about the size of a book — which Pati and Laura have generated in a matter of months.

5. Balance of Power 21st Century (BoP2K). This is the demo that will prove to a doubting world that Storytronics really works. As such, it has to be damned good, and it isn’t even venial-sin good yet. It can be fun sometimes, but there are still way too many nasty gotchas, and it needs a lot more tuning. This is entirely MY fault. I have been poking my nose into everything else that Storytron does, and not giving BoP2K the time it needs. So BoP2K struggles along, a step at a time.

So how much longer will Storytron remain in vapor? How much longer will we give you promises that we later break?

The board of directors discussed this matter at length at its recent meeting, and we hammered out the details of how we’re going to handle the launch. This time, though, we really want to be sure about our promises. Therefore, all we are saying at this time that the launch will NOT occur before August 18th. We are HOPEFUL that it will occur by September 1st. And that’s the best we can say at this time.

Please do not conclude that we couldn’t meet a deadline to save our lives. In every case, we have deferred the launch in order to improve the quality of our products. We could in fact have launched on January 1st, 2008, as originally planned — and the product we had ready at that time was better than what was originally planned. However, we deemed it to be unacceptable, so we pushed the deadline back. The same thing happened in mid-March; Swat and Storyteller were better than we had expected back in January — but they still weren’t good enough.

The changes we have been making have dramatically improved our technology. Yes, it’s frustrating to have to wait. You think you’re frustrated? However much you’re frustrated, I’m frustrated a lot more. But we only get one chance to show off to the venture capitalists, and we want to make this our best shot.

So all we can say is, stand by. We’ve been very open about keeping you up to date on the latest developments. We will continue to do so. It looks like we might have a release in about a month — but don’t hold us to that date.

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Things may appear to have been quiet around here lately, but in truth we’ve been a beehive of activity. Pati is almost done with the new rewritten tutorials (the existing ones were written in February and much has changed since then). Facundo and Louis have been fixing lots of silly little bugs that arise from people accessing our server from multiple platforms with multiple browsers, dealing with problems arising from the server being too busy, and generally making our server software more robust.

But the biggest hangup has all been my fault: getting Balance of Power 21st Century up and running. We had a version running in early June and the beta testers made a great many useful suggestions, some of which entailed substantial changes in storyworld. We decided to implement a number of important changes, which in turn pushed the whole schedule back.

Well, BoP2K is coming into focus. For the last few days I’ve been doing nothing but fine-tuning the behavior. For example, right now Iran is caving in a little too easily — I need to adjust its parameters to make it a little more recalcitrant. Last night I tuned the algorithm that awards Prestige to the player for achieving a diplomatic success. This is the kind of stuff I’m working on these days — not much architectural stuff. Which means that we’re getting very close to being ready to resume beta testing.

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I attended the Games For Change Conference in New York City on Tuesday, June 3rd. I spoke in the first panel discussion on ‘ancient games for change’, along with Jim Gasperini, author of Hidden Agenda. My primary purpose was to talk about Balance of Power (1984) and Balance of the Planet (1990). However, I snuck in a little about Storytron, and at the Expo that evening I showed off Storytron.

Response was good. I spent most of my time sitting in the hall outside the session, conversing with people about Storytron. Some of the people I chatted with were with companies that might have an interest in using Storytron technology; others were individuals who have long dreamed of building an interactive product with true interpersonal elements. I fear that most underestimate the magnitude of the task they have set themselves. Nevertheless, I think that we’ll get some people seriously looking at Storytron and perhaps even get a few authors. Thus, the conference was, from my point of view, a success.

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I’m pleased to announce that Storytron’s shiny new website is up.

Pati, Louis, and I have been working since April to get all the pages built and working according to specs. Now we want your input. Let us know what you think. Post your comments, questions, and feedback in our Website forum, here.

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I will be speaking at the Games for Change conference in New York City next week. You can find details at:

Games for Change Conference

but you’ll have to pay for the privilege of heckling me. I’ll be talking about my old games on Tuesday morning the 3rd, and I’ll be showing off Storytron on the evening of the 3rd.

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Pati has added some new forums to the StoryBoard. In the Authors’ Guild Category, Storybuilding Creative Issues, we have: * Storyworld Toolbox

(Storyworld scripting techniques, do’s and don’ts, brainstorming, troubleshooting)

* Secret Masters of Strondom

(Design theory, authorial chit chat, holding forth on the state of the field)

For these two areas, you need author access. Let Pati know by creating a new post or topic here, if you are not currently signed up as an author and would like access to that category. In addition, we have two new forums in our Everybody Category. In the Technology area, we have: * Website

(Feedback and commentary on the website layout, art, and content)

In Rutabagas, our catchall area for topics that don’t fit neatly into other categories, we have my personal fave: * The Kashgar Bazaar#

(Storytron’s open-air forum. This, that, and the other. Speak your mind.)

________ #The Kashgar Bazaar was a famous open-air market on the Silk Road, which ran from the Mediterranean deep into China. It was a major trade route for over a thousand years. Chris is an avid historian and can tell you much more about it. Join the discussion!

Pati has gathered feedback on our webpages and is in the process of making adjustments to the layout. I’ll post an announcement in News and the StoryBoard when they go up. Watch this space.

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The Board of Directors met by telephone conference call yesterday and approved our rollout plan. Here are the key dates for that rollout plan:

June 1st: SWAT and Storyteller will be declared to be Version 1.0. The website will be ready to go except for the tutorials and reference materials, which will be in draft form. Balance of Power 21st Century will be opened up for beta testing. We will announce our status to a small group of people. We will carefully monitor server usage in anticipation of load problems.

June 8th: We will continue beta testing, and will complete the reference materials.

June 15th: Grand Opening Day! Balance of Power 21st Century will go final, and at that point we will begin our publicity campaign. Until June 15th, we want this information to be passed on by word-of-mouth only. Please do not publicly announce this rollout plan on any blogs, but feel free to notify people privately. We want to restrict the beta testing period to those people who are directly interested in Storytron. If the news is spread too widely, we’ll be crushed by a server overload.

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We are once again pushing back our rollout date. Yes, I know, the rollout date appears to be receding at the rate of about one week per week. However, the delays have been due to… well, you know, we have lots of good excuses, and they’re boring.

So here’s the current plan: we are pulling all the pieces together (and there are a LOT of pieces to pull together!) There are four major components that have to be completed:

1. The website. This is in good shape now. We had a major disaster when it became apparent that our vendor wasn’t doing anything. But Pati Nagle came to the rescue, and Laura managed the entire process, and the website is coming together nicely.

2. Swat. Again, we had a major upset when I decided to redesign the way that WordSockets function. But Facundo has been repairing the damage I wrought and Swat is now nicely functional and we are working on minor bug fixes.

3. The tutorials. These are still in early form. I wrote about 90 pages of material for them but now they have to be completely reworked. That won’t happen for a few more weeks.

4. BoP2K. This is the single most important task and the most problematic. I have resumed work on it after the delay imposed by surgery and other messes. I am making good progress. It is already playable, but it’s not yet ready for prime time. You just don’t know when something will be ready until it’s ready. That’s scary. But I think I’ll have it ready to go on June 1st.

Our plan, then, is to have all the pieces in decent shape by June 1st. However, we haven’t had much beta testing, so we need to schedule time for that. The month of June will be beta testing month. I am currently writing a rollout plan for how we will publicize the site starting on June 1st.

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Now that the bulk of the HTML pages are up, we’ve reached another quiescent period, with several efforts going on behind the scenes.

Pati is taking a respite this weekend, after three weeks of intense work re-creating our website from scratch. Facundo is back (hooray!), and I suspect he has already begun sorting out and cleaning up some of the software changes that occurred while he was away. Irene and I are working on the privacy policy, so we can bring the Registration/ Login and Feedback pages up. Chris is finishing up BoP2k, while Louis builds some nifty specialized tools for the Players section.

I’m particularly excited about this last. Ultimately, it’s the storyworlds themselves that matter. But building the frames they’ll be contained within — the doorway into them — that’s cool too. It will give people a first real glimpse at what we intend.

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