Anansi is a framework for creating social simulation-driven visual novel experiences in Unity. It combines the Ink narrative scripting language, a storylet architecture, and a social simulation that manages non-player character (NPC) schedules, emotions, personality traits, and relationships. Interactions with NPCs affect their feelings toward the player and other NPCs. Additionally, NPCs can reason about their relationship with the player and respond to events that happen to other characters in their social circle. For example, betraying a character will make their friends and family like you less. In short, adding this element of social simulation to visual novels should allow game developers to create dynamic and reactive interactive storytelling experiences more quickly than starting from scratch. Anansi draws most of its inspiration from Persona 5's use of life simulation, time, and character relationships to drive narrative progression.
Anansi is a good solution for people who want to quickly port their Ink games to Unity. Setting up UI and dialogue management can be cumbersome. Anansi provides starting UI prefabs to help with this. Also, since Anansi is built on top of Ink, users can start with a normal Ink story and incrementally add Anansi-specific features into their games. While Anansi can handle almost any Ink story, it really shines with stories that revolve around character relationships and navigation from one location to another.
- ⏰ DateTime system tracks the current week, day, and time of day (morning, noon, evening, etc.)
- 📍 Story locations update their backgrounds based on the time of day
- ❤️ Underlying relationships system to drive content selection
- ✏️ Write story content using Ink
- 🗓️ Characters move locations based on daily schedules
The following are instructions for installing Anansi into your Unity project. This is the recommended installation method because it facilitates dependency downloading when working on a game with collaborators. Anansi is not available in the Unity Asset store.
- Open your project in Unity
- Open the package manager window by selecting
Window > Package Managerin the top menu. - Click the
+icon in the top left, and selectAdd package from git URL.... - Paste the following URL:
https://github.com/ShiJbey/Anansi.git?path=/Packages/com.shijbey.anansi#v1.0.0 - This will install version
v1.0.0to your project. If you want a different version changev1.0.0to any tagged version - Wait, and you should see
Anansiappear in the package manager window with a version matching your downloaded version. - Close the package manager window.
Tip
This project uses semantic versioning. So, major version numbers will have breaking changes. Minor version changes will mostly contain new features, but there is always a chance of a breaking change. Please check the CHANGELOG to see what changed between releases.
Below are features not currently supported by Anansi but are common in other visual novel tools. I will implement them if there is enough interest and time.
- Dialogue "auto-play"
- Dialogue "skip"
- Dialogue backlog/history
- Save/load
- Choice rollback (I don't plan to add this due to social simulation complexity)
If you want to try your hand at contributing new features to Anansi:
- Create a new Issue for the feature (if one does not already exist)
- Fork the repository
- Make your changes
- Submit a pull request and describe your changes.
You can find the latest documentation for Anansi in the wiki. If something does not make sense, feels broken, or needs improvement, please create a new GitHub Issue.
Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome! Please check the Issues page
Don't forget to star ⭐️ this repo if this project has helped you or you find it interesting.
I release all my tools as free and open source projects. My graduate schooling has been partially funded by federal grants, paid for using tax-dollars from hard-working, everyday people. Thank you to those who make it possible for student like me to do what I do.
This project is MIT licensed.
If you built a game using Anansi, we would love to hear about it. Please get in touch with us, and we will add an image and link to your game below. Also, remember to credit Anansi in your projects. More exposure helps the project grow.
- TBD
Storylets are an approach to narrative design where the narrative experience is broken into discrete pieces that are dynamically served to the player based on some preconditions. Emily Short provides a helpful blog going into more depth about Storylets and various potential application areas. Also, Max Kreminski provides an informative survey of the design space of storylets in games.
Ink is a great scripting language for creating branching narrative experiences. It's been battle-tested in multiple commercial games. It provides enough end-sure flexibility to allow frameworks like Anansi to leverage it as the content-authoring back-end. If you want to become more familiar with Ink, please check out Inkle Studio's website and their portfolio of narrative games.
Yes. Anansi is UI-agnostic. The UI prefabs that come with it help you get up and running faster than starting from scratch.
Yes it was. I had named it after Naomie Harris' character Tia Dalma/Calypso in Pirates of the Caribbean. However, the greek mythology around Calypso, as depicted in the Odyssey, is better known and I didn't want the two that directly associated.
Anansi is an Akan storytelling diety, often depicted as a spider. So, the name fits perfectly. Plus Anansi makes for a bangin' logo.