Stepping Story

About
Character Profiles
Relations Network
Character Chat
Chat

Inspiration

Sometimes writers feel stuck on one side, staring at a blank page. Writer’s block isn’t a lack of ideas, but knowing what you want to say, and the words won't come out. So we imagined a tool that lets authors step into their stories and talk to the people who live there.

What it does

We built this app to let authors communicate with their characters and explore the world they’ve created. Authors can talk to their characters anywhere, having live conversations over text. Characters answer with their own emotions and tone, staying true to how they’ve been written. Social networks are also visualised for each story, showing who knows who, how strongly they are connected and where there are gaps, so plotlines and friendships become clearer at a glance. The result is a bridge between you and your stories.

How we built it

We wanted to explore something new, so instead of going with a backend made with Flask, as we were all used to, we decided to go for a full stack made with SvelteKit. Svelte made it super easy for us to have a multipage structure, allowing each character chat to have its own page for its chat. We were also very keen on having a network graph of all the characters in the story to further deepen our understanding of any story. We determined that the advantages of a relational database remained very useful for storing messages and characters, but we knew we needed something better suited to the job to store complex network graphs. For this, we threw ourselves at yet another new technology for all of us: Neo4j. We were able to explore the trade-offs of a No-SQL DB like Neo4j. Ultimately, we were here to challenge ourselves both technically and creatively, and our approach to ideating and creating this project is the ultimate reflection of these values.

Challenges we ran into

We built a feature for live audible conversations, which was able to work in isolation, however, we struggled to fully integrate it into our backend, which was a hurdle during the final few hours of the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A lot of the tools that we used in this hackathon were ones that we hadn't been familiar with before, and so we are proud that we were able to learn new tools such as Neo4j, ChromaDB and Svelte, which pushed us out of our comfort zones and expanded our knowledge.