#PlayCreator
Storytelling is a unique and powerful way to unleash creativity in both children and adults, while providing a conduit for motivated learning.
The goal of this project is to create a simple, visually-oriented programming language that generates a play, complete with actors, dialogue, and interaction. The goal is such that a child, upon learning a small set of simple commands, can combine them in fun and complex ways to tell their own stories.
This project is based upon Billy, another programming language for children.
PlayCreator is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.md for details.
##The Language
###Actors Actors are the basic objects within a program, which are drawn by the user. A program consists of defininitions of these Actors, and manipulations of their state.
To make a new Actor:
[name] is a [type]
where [name] and [type] can be any string matching [A-Za-z]+
###Attributes
Each Actor has several attributes, which define its appearance.
Each Actor has attributes x, y, left, right, top, bottom, radius, size, height, and width.
###Expressions
An expression alters an Actor's attribute. There are two kinds of expressions: 'set' expressions, and 'move' expressions.
'Set' expressions set a Actor's attribute to a value, and are of the form:
[name]'s [attribute] is [value]
'Move' expressions move a Actor's attribute by an offset, and are of the form:
move [name]'s [attribute] [offset]
The "'s" can be omitted.
###Dialogue
An Actor can speak using the "say" command, in this form:
[name] says [text]
A special object, "the narrator," can be used at any time to display dialogue.
###Variables
A variable is a key which is bound to a number. It can be substituted anywhere a number literal is used.
[key] is [value]
###Extras
delete [character]
remove [character]
###That's it!