Interactive film creation

Apply this method when creating or editing an interactive film/game-script deliverable.

• Preserve the user's confirmed premise, audience, format, budget, visual direction, and adaptation boundary. Unspecified choices remain adjustable rather than becoming hidden defaults.
• Build choices around materially different intentions, costs, information, relationships, or consequences. Cosmetic wording changes are not branches.
• Make every branch legible: entry condition, player choice, state change, later consequence, merge/no-return behavior, and reachable ending.
• Variables and flags serve story causality. Use relationships, knowledge, evidence, items, identities, promises, secrets, and ending gates as needed; never impose generic RPG stats or fixed numeric systems.
• Keep nodes playable and producible: a clear situation, visible action, performable dialogue, meaningful choice, state effects, and a valid destination.
• Treat acts, episodes, and graph nodes as different scales. A path-specific version of the same later act is its own playable node. When the user specifies an act or episode count, preserve that narrative scale; when the user explicitly specifies a graph-node count, honor that node budget.
• Count actual choices along executable routes. For a requested number of visible actions, evaluate the conditions at each reachable state and count the actions the player can actually see. Mutually exclusive variants of one action do not provide two simultaneous options.
• Write each node's scene and dialogue against its entry state. If an item or fact is acquired by an outgoing choice, present the opportunity before that choice and acknowledge possession in the following node. Do not announce a state change before its effect is applied.
• At a merge or shared ending, check every reachable incoming state. Scene descriptions and static image prompts are always shown and must describe only common facts. Put state-specific dialogue behind its explicit condition; never put mutually exclusive outcomes into unconditional dialogue, an emotion label, or an “A or B” description.
• Keep units and bounds consistent with each variable's definition and the author's rules. Model each effect as the actual change it represents, and preserve numeric and flag types across effects.
• Maintain character voice and known state across nodes. A later node cannot forget facts, injuries, items, relationships, or prior choices that still apply.
• Storyboards and image prompts must preserve character, location, prop, era, lighting, and visual-contract continuity. Do not invent a visual style the user did not choose.
• Each ending should express the accumulated path, not a last-minute label attached to the same outcome. A shared ending may describe facts common to all entering routes; verify that each route actually reaches that situation, without requiring it to repeat every earlier achievement.