Unfold Studio

Unfold Studio is an online community for interactive storytelling powered by a programming language called Ink. Interactive storytelling brings together the power of programming with the ability of stories to represent and explore our lived realities. Unfold Studio is free and open-source.

Unfold Studio is used in schools, clubs, and by many individual writers. Interactive storytelling can be a way to integrate Computer Science into English, Social Studies, or other subjects. It can also be an excellent way to introduce Computer Science as a subject relevant to questions of identity, culture, and social justice. (We are currently doing research with a school which uses Unfold Studio for several months as part of its core CS curriculum.)

Unfold Studio's main documentation is at docs.unfold.studio.

Development

Development of Unfold Studio is currently migrating to this repository's issues page. New bug reports should be filed here. There is additional code to support school and teacher features which is not currently open-source.

Setup

These steps should get a development instance running on linux or MacOS.

1. From bare-bones digital ocean droplet, running as root. Probably not necessary for other contexts.

   apt-get update
   apt-get install python3-venv
   

2. Basic setup

   cd /opt # (Or wherever you want to install)
   python3 -m venv env
   source env/bin/activate
   git clone https://github.com/cproctor/unfold_studio.git
   cd unfold_studio
   pip install -r requirements.txt
   cp unfold_studio/base_settings.py unfold_studio/settings.py
   python manage.py migrate
   python manage.py collectstatic
   python manage.py runserver
   

This should be enough to get a local server running; you can test it by navigating to http://localhost:8000.

1. Inklecate

To save (and compile) stories, you'll also need an Inklecate executable, which you can get from https://github.com/inkle/ink/releases. You'll probably have to configure settings.py a bit to get it to work.

1. Cron jobs

Stories and books are weighted according to priority, which depends on factors defined in settings. Content is subject to 'gravity,' causing older content to fall and make room for newer content.
Therefore, stories need to be re-weighted from time to time. At the same time, when there's a lot of content, it becomes burdensome to re-weight it all every few minutes. The cron jobs below achieve a good compromise, updating the weights of top stories every ten minutes, and then updating all the content once a day.

    0 3 * * * python3 /opt/unfold_studio/manage.py update_story_priority
    */10 * * * * python3 /opt/unfold_studio/manage.py update_story_priority -n 100
    0 * * * * python3 /opt/unfold_studio/manage.py update_book_priority