Prairie is a library of scripts for Unity that enables non-programmers to create interactive historical experiences.
Caitlin Donahue, Graham Earley, Charlie Imhoff, Matt Javaly, Brennan Kuo, and Chris Shoemaker developed Prairie in 2017 for their senior project at Carleton College.
Prairie provides a robust interaction system which allows game designers to quickly and easily add tactile interactivity to their scenes.
Prairie comes with a suite of pre-made interactions to play audio, open doors, toggle lights, and more. All of these can be added to any object in the scene, and either manually activated by the player or triggered automatically when the player enters an area.
Prairie provides a streamlined method to add historical context directly into the game environment. The annotation system allows historians to add annotation "footnotes" to the objects and locations within the scene.
These annotations can include rich text and images, allowing users to experience primary and secondary sources while playing through the game.
Together with Twine, Prairie provides an easy method to write a non-linear story, and then have players experience that situation firsthand in a historical game.
Prairie provides an importer for Twine stories, and then a variety of tools to progress through the story's events within the game.