''Storybook Weaver'' is a 1994

educational game Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are desig ...

released on floppy disk for the

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

, aimed at children aged 6–12. An updated version, Storybook Weaver Deluxe, was released for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

and Mac computers and featured much more content than the original. Both versions were released by

MECC The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC, was an organization founded in 1971 best known for developing the edutainment video game series ''The Oregon Trail (series), The Oregon Trail'' and i ...

. The Deluxe version was made available for both home and school environments. A Teacher Resource CD for the software included lesson plans and user guides.

Gameplay

Storybook Weaver

Storybook Weaver is a program that is intended to enable and motivate children to easily create their own stories on a computer. The most noticeable feature of the game is the sizable space allowed for illustrations on each page of a story. The game offered hundreds of backgrounds, objects and characters that could be selected from easy-to-use categories and placed anywhere on the page through a simple click-and-drag process. Backgrounds in the original featured mostly natural, outdoor locations, with which players could switch between day, night, dawn and dusk effects on the landscape. Users could piece together items such as walls and floors to create indoor settings for stories. The graphical objects offered in the software included food, furniture, vehicles, vegetation, housing, floors, doors, walls, weather effects, natural landscape features and so on. The characters which could be placed in a story included humans, animals and make-believe people from fairytales and classic mythology. There were many human characters of various nationalities, most of which had several positions to choose from, including standing, running, sitting and sleeping. Fantasy characters included fearsome

dragons A dragon is a reptilian legendary creature that appears in the folklore of many cultures worldwide. Beliefs about dragons vary considerably through regions, but dragons in western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as ...

hobbit Hobbits are a fictional race of people in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. About half average human height, Tolkien presented hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof. Occasionally known as halflings in Tolkien's writings, ...

s, fairies,

giants A giant is a being of human appearance, sometimes of prodigious size and strength, common in folklore. Giant(s) or The Giant(s) may also refer to: Mythology and religion *Giants (Greek mythology) *Jötunn, a Germanic term often translated as 'gi ...

, ghosts, Greek mythological creatures and magical beings such as sorcerers and witches such as

Baba Yaga In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga, also spelled Baba Jaga (from Polish), is a supernatural being (or one of a trio of sisters of the same name) who appears as a deformed and/or ferocious-looking woman. In fairy tales Baba Yaga flies around in a ...

. Any object could be creatively manipulated to produce various effects, through flipping objects through various angles or modifying colour, size and shape in a paintshop-type program. For example, a puddle of water could be turned red to represent a pool of blood.

Storybook Weaver Deluxe

The Deluxe version incorporated a combination of material and functionality from the Storybook Weaver and the My Own Stories software titles and greatly expanded on the features of the original Storybook Weaver with a completely updated user interface. This version largely kept the original backgrounds, items and characters from the original game and added a large number of new objects and categories, such as a world landmark category, including the Statue of Liberty and the

White House The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...

. The objects from the original version were updated in higher textures to match the quality of the new objects. The game offered a lot more features in the real and modern indoor and outdoor world, including streets, cities, a bedroom, a classroom, a shopping mall and much more. The game didn't skimp, however, on aspects of the ancient or fantasy worlds. A noticeable feature of the Deluxe version was its bilingual capacity. Users could now write stories in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

, accompanied with a bilingual text-to-speech feature, an English/Spanish spell checker and a

thesaurus A thesaurus (plural ''thesauri'' or ''thesauruses'') or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea: Synonym dictionar ...

. Deluxe also included "story-starters" for children who found it more difficult to get into the creative mindset, a voice recording feature, spoken tutorials and a library of object sounds and music. The Deluxe version of the program was re-released in a 2004 edition.

Critical reception

Patrick Honan of Computer Shopper liked that the game transformed stories into multimedia experiences, and appreciated how the game was simple enough to use while difficult enough to master. Meanwhile, Lesley Alderman of ''

The Buffalo News ''The Buffalo News'' is the daily newspaper of the Buffalo–Niagara Falls metropolitan area, located in downtown Buffalo, New York. It recently sold its headquarters to Uniland Development Corp. It was for decades the only paper fully owned by W ...

'' listed the title in an article called "10 TOP-RATED SOFTWARE SELECTIONS FOR YOUR CHILDREN". ''T H E Journal'' appreciated the game's goal to inspire and motivate kids, and liked that it offered an "easy-to-use" word processor. Knight Ridder described the program as "effortless".

References

External links

*{{MobyGames, id=/storybook-weaver-deluxe, name=Storybook Weaver Deluxe 1994 video games 2004 video games Children's educational video games Classic Mac OS games Video games developed in the United States Windows games Writing media