Storytron > Swat > Step-by-step tutorial

Step-by-step tutorial

Welcome to Storytronicsª! This is complicated stuff and we're going to make it easier for you by introducing the concepts to you in a step-by-step sequence. You'll learn enough at each step to do something interesting -- and we'll keep it as simple as possible. That's a promise.

A few absolutely fundamental concepts

There are a few terms and concepts that you must grasp before we can even begin to talk about using Swat. The first of these is easy enough: Actor. An Actor is simply a character in the storyworld. Actors have Traits and Attributes that characterize them. For example, an Actor's Name is one such attribute; another attribute is the Actor's Location.

More complex is the concept of the Event. An Event is a single action taken by a single individual. An Event is very much like a sentence: it has a Subject, a Verb, a direct object (which we call DirObject), and various other parts that spell out in detail exactly what happened. For now, though, you should think of an Event as just a Subject, Verb, and DirObject.

As you might imagine, a Subject is always an Actor; so is a DirObject. In other words, we don't permit Events such as "The rock sat on the road." or "It rained today." Every Event always takes the form "Somebody did something to somebody else."

The most complicated concept in Storytronicsª is the Verb, which is the basic unit of action in a storyworld. You will spend most of your time as a storybuilder creating Verbs, and in this tutorial we will introduce you to their most basic concepts. Let's get started.