This document assumes prior experience with ECS, and only aims to motivate why ECS for Storyscript.

The Storyscript editing experience is very structured - it's not a typical compiler chain transforming plain text. With this structure, we have the opportunity to associate lots of independent pieces of data with things.

Take for example the following Storyscript snippet:

Slack is a thing. It's a thing that has a lot of different data attributes for example:

• It is an atom (not plain text but a single unit on the page)
• It has a display (Slack)
• It has help (though you can't see it here)
• It is uniquely identifiable

In fact here is a screenshot from our dev tools showing the components associated with this entity:

Similarly, let's look at the components for the whole line. There's information about how this block is structured in the page:

• It's a child of a skill
• It has some siblings
• It has a presence that is Linked on the page

There's information about what type of block it is:

• It's a GroupActuator (when ... or, once ...) type structures

There's information about the token line: