Story Engine Toolchain
ForbocAI: The Story Engine Toolchain
Tóólcháin_Cóncépt // Stóry_Éngíne
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“Story in a game is like story in a porn movie.” — John Carmack
Carmack was wrong. Not because story matters more than he thought, but because story and agency are the same thing when you have the right architecture.
The Missing Engine
We have:
- Game Engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot) — Handle physics, rendering, input
- Graphics Engines (Vulkan, DirectX) — Handle polygons and shaders
- Physics Engines (Box2D, PhysX) — Handle collision and forces
We don’t have:
- Story Engines — Handle narrative, dialogue, consequence, memory
Why? Because story was always scripted—handcrafted dialogue trees, fixed branching paths. The technology to make story generative and reactive didn’t exist until:
- LLMs (the ability to generate coherent text)
- Vector DBs (the ability to recall relevant context)
- Neuro-Symbolic Validation (the ability to constrain hallucinations)
ForbocAI provides all three. It IS a story engine.
The Disco Elysium Case Study
The Misconception
“ForbocAI is only for enemy AI in action games.”
The Reality
ForbocAI is more suited to Disco Elysium-style narrative games than to action roguelikes.
Understanding Disco Elysium’s Architecture
Disco Elysium is not really a “game” in the traditional sense. It’s an agent ensemble simulation wearing the skin of an RPG.
The genius of Disco Elysium: Your skills (Logic, Rhetoric, Electrochemistry, etc.) aren’t just numbers—they’re characters. They have opinions. They react. They remember.
This is exactly what ForbocAI agents do.
Mapping ForbocAI to Disco Elysium
The Internal Monologue as Agent Orchestra
In Disco Elysium, you might see:
With ForbocAI, each skill is an agent:
Memory: The Foundation of Choice-Consequence
Disco Elysium REMEMBERS:
- You were rude to Kim → He trusts you less
- You found the body early → New dialogue unlocks
- You have the “Hobocop” thought → Special self-perception
ForbocAI’s Memory module is built for this:
The temporal decay feature ensures that:
- Recent memories are vivid
- Old memories fade unless reinforced
- Traumatic memories (high importance) persist
The Bridge: Preventing Narrative Hallucination
A common failure mode for LLM-driven games:
LLM: “You pull out your gun and shoot the suspect.”
Problem: You don’t HAVE a gun. You threw it in the sea.
ForbocAI’s Bridge validates every action:
The Toolchain Vision: Composable Story Components
This is where it becomes a true Story Engine. ForbocAI is not one tool—it’s a toolchain of composable generative AI components.
Architecture
Component Status
Functional Programming: Pipes Not Trees
Traditional narrative systems use branching trees:
ForbocAI uses functional pipes:
Why pipes are better:
- Composable: Each component is independent and can be swapped
- Traceable: Every transformation is logged and reproducible
- Parallelizable: Multiple agents can process simultaneously
- Testable: Pure functions are trivial to unit test
Beyond Disco Elysium: More Agency, More Emergence
Example: Emergent Skill Evolution
In Disco Elysium, if you level up “Electrochemistry,” you just hear from it more often.
In ForbocAI:
The Universal Agent Primitive
The ForbocAI SDK is engine-agnostic and genre-agnostic.
The same modules that power:
- A guard deciding whether to attack or flee (action game)
…also power:
- An internal voice deciding whether to interject (Disco Elysium)
- A narrative beat deciding whether to escalate (story engine)
- A procedural level deciding where to place a clue (mystery game)
The Agent is the universal primitive. An “agent” can be:
- A physical NPC in the world
- A disembodied voice in the player’s head
- An environmental presence (“The city of Revachol knows…”)
- A meta-narrative director (“Tension should rise in Act 2”)
Conclusion
ForbocAI is not “just for action game AI.”
ForbocAI is the missing layer between:
- Raw LLMs (creative but hallucinatory)
- Game engines (deterministic but static)
It enables constrained emergence:
- LLMs provide the creativity
- Bridge provides the rules
- Memory provides the continuity
- Agents provide the personality
Disco Elysium proved the concept. ForbocAI provides the infrastructure.
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