Whisper (GameMaker Dynamic, Reactive Narrative Manager)

Ever wanted to build a game that has a narrative that reacts to the players actions, like the narrative in Hades that "remembers what you did", or a storyteller-style stream of eligible events for a game like RimWorld? Or maybe trait-driven event chains and situational scenes that appear because of who your character is and what they've done like in Crusader Kings?

If so, then Whisper is the tool for you.

Whisper is a narrative manager built around the concept of "storylets". In essence, you add your story to Whisper, tell Whisper how you want that story managed, and then Whisper surfaces the right bit of story ("storylet") for the right moment in your game.

Please note: The screenshots are a visual showcase of how Whisper works. Whisper is an internal code library and does not come with a display like that. They are simply showing how Whisper can dynamically filter your story to suit the conditions of the game in the moment.

Get the Full Suite Pass bundle to get all current and future tools for one low price (price will increase each time a new tool launches, so get in early for substantial savings!)

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Features

• Add lots of narrative moments, grouped into "pools" (like "town square" or "combat").
• Filter the narrative via hard or soft gates, using AND/OR/NOT tag filtering, plus "preferred tags" that bias picks without hard-locking your content.
• Predicates that allow you to dynamically change what storylets are available based on a provided game context.
  
• Limit narrative beats on a total, per-run or even "avoid immediate repeats if possible" level.
• Limit narrative beats on a total, per-run or even "don't repeat the last thing that was said" level.
• Add in-line variations ("##planet_name##" autofilled from a list of inserts), or even emit gameplay hooks from within a narrative beat via "verbs" ("#?trigger_fight:boss_crow##" could trigger a function that starts a boss fight with a crow).
• Comprehensive documentation to help you use Whisper (check it out here).

And more stuff, but that's the core of it.

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What Whisper Isn't

Whisper is NOT a "draw your dialogue" system.

It's not a dialogue tree tool. Tools like Yarn Spinner or Chatterbox run a specific conversation. Whisper decides which moments are eligible right now, and can trigger gameplay via verbs.

It's not a narrative authoring database like articy:draft. articy helps you plan and export content, whereas Whisper is the in-game system that selects and executes content dynamically.

It's not a full interactive fiction tool like Twine, or a VN engine like Ren'Py. Those can be the whole game. Whisper plugs into your game to make it feel reactive and state-driven.

It's not a single scripted story language like Ink. Ink is great when you're running through one authored narrative script, whereas Whisper is great when your game is a pool of moments that unlock based on state.

In other words, Whisper is designed to let you centralise a bunch of disparate checks, conditions and decisions about narrative that is all too often spread higgledy-piggledy throughout your codebase into a solid, dynamic, easy to use system that makes building a dynamically reactive narrative actually fun.

You provide Whisper with the context around your game state, and it gives you back an appropriate storylet, which you can then display to the player however you wish to

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Part of the RefresherTowel Games Toolkits

Part of a growing suite of GameMaker tools that are designed to play nicely together. If you like this style of tooling, you might also want:

• Whisper - make your narrative dynamic and reactive, like Hades or Crusader Kings III.
• Catalyst - makes modifiable numbers & statistics super easy.
• Pulse - a signals and events framework (supporting queries that allow you to ask questions instead of just broadcast signals!)
• Statement - a state machine framework (with a fully visual in-game debugger).
• Echo - advanced debug logging (level filtering, tags, optional stack traces, history dumps) that now comes with an advanced, yet easy to use debug UI builder!

Get Pulse, Catalyst, Statement and Echo in the Ignition Kit bundle for a discount! Or buy the Full Suite Pass bundle (get access to all past and future tools) in one go!