Playhouse

Playhouse was an early experiment in making a narrative sandbox. The idea was that you'd be able to arrange a couple of dolls from your doll collection on the little stage, together with one or more props, and say NOW in order to see a short scene involving those characters and scenes. Props would specify themes and subject matter for the scene.

I gave up when other projects consumed my attention, and when I realized that I was going to require an almost unfathomable amount of content to build this the way I wanted to. If I were going to try again now, I would manage it very differently, using more advanced procedural generation techniques to combine elements. And some of these notions have since been done much better (not to mention actually *finished*) in Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe's Ice-Bound Concordance.