The quest in a generated world

2011

Abstract Computer role playing games engage players through interleaved story and open-ended game play. We present an approach to procedurally generating, rendering, and making playable novel games based on a priori unknown story structures. These stories may be authored by humans or by computational story generation systems. Our approach couples player, designer, and algorithm to generate a novel game using preferences for game play style, general design aesthetics, and a novel story structure.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2019

Narrative puzzles involve exploration, logical thinking and progressing a story. This paper presents a narrative design innovation in the form of a system for the procedural generation of such puzzles for use in story-rich games or games with large open worlds. The approach uses an extended type of context-free grammar as the basis for both the generation algorithm and the puzzle solving. Each designer-defined rule in the grammar defines a possible behavior of item types in the game world. Puzzles are generated at runtime on a per area basis, through recursive generation of inputs for outputs. Given a valid grammar, the system guarantees that its puzzles are solvable.

This project tackles procedural generation of narrative puzzles found in adventure games. The challenge is not only generating the puzzles in games which traditionally only have one walkthrough, but also making the development process accessible to designers. Given that the goal is to make these games playable and easy to develop, the focus of this project is facilitating the immediate development of these games. This paper describes the system of procedural generation of one game, Symon, which was the reference and inspiration for a standalone toolset, the Puzzle Dice System to create other adventure games with procedurally generated puzzles. The toolset has been put to the test with another game, Stranded in Singapore, and it is still being expanded and improved on at the moment of writing.

2011

Abstract This paper discusses the concept of procedural content generation-based (PCG-based) game design as a way to create new kinds of playable experiences. We examine the different ways that PCG is currently used in games, and how that use impacts the meaning of the game and the player's experience.

As game designers shift focus from graphical realism to immersive stories, the number of game-object interactions grows exponentially. Games use manually written scripts to control interactions. ScriptEase provides game designers with generative patterns that generate scripting code to control common interactions. This paper describes a new kind of generative pattern, quest patterns, that generate scripting code to control story plot. We present our quest pattern architecture and study results that show quest patterns are easy-to-use and reduce plot scripting errors.

Proceedings of the 9th …, 2012

Generating immersive game content is one of the ultimate goals for a game designer. This goal can be achieved by realizing the fact that players' perception of the same game differ according to a number of factors including: players' personality, playing styles, expertise and culture background. While one player might find the game immersive, others may quit playing as a result of encountering a seemingly insoluble problem. One promising avenue towards optimizing the gameplay experience for individual game players is to tailor player experience in real-time via automatic game content generation. Specifying the aspects of the game that have the major influence on the gameplay experience, identifying the relationship between these aspect and each individual experience and defining a mechanism for tailoring the game content according to each individual needs are important steps towards player-driven content generation.

2013

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of procedural content generation (PCG) in games. It starts with defining three grand goals of PCG, namely multi-level multicontent PCG, PCG-based game design and generating complete games. The way these goals are defined, they are not feasible with current technology. Therefore we identify nine challenges for PCG research. Work towards meeting these challenges is likely to take us closer to realising the three grand goals. In order to help researchers get started, we also identify five actionable steps, which PCG researchers could get started working on immediately.

2011

Abstract An analysis of over 750 quests from four popular RPGs (Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes) reveals that RPG quests appear to share a common structure. We propose a classification of RPG quests based on this structure, and describe a prototype quest generator based on that classification. Our aim is to procedurally generate quests that are complex, multi-leveled, and plausible to players of RPGs.

2013

Hundreds of millions of people play computer games every day. For them, game content–from 3D objects to abstract puzzles–plays a major entertainment role. Manual labor has so far ensured that the quality and quantity of game content matched the demands of the playing community, but is facing new scalability challenges due to the exponential growth over the last decade of both the gamer population and the production costs.

IEEE Transactions on Games, 2019

Procedural content generation (PCG) for games has existed since the 1980s and is becoming increasingly important for creating game worlds, backstory, and characters across many genres, in particular, open-world games, such as Minecraft (2011) and No Man's Sky (2016). A particular challenge faced by such games is that the content and/or gameplay may become repetitive. Puzzles constitute an effective technique for improving gameplay by offering players interesting problems to solve, but the use of PCG for generating puzzles has been limited compared with its use for other game elements, and efforts have focused mainly on games that are strictly puzzle games, rather than creating puzzles to be incorporated into other genres. Nevertheless, a significant body of work exists, which allows puzzles of different types to be generated algorithmically, and there is scope for much more research into this area. This paper presents a detailed survey of existing work in PCG for puzzles, reviewing 32 methods within 11 categories of puzzles. For the purpose of analysis, this paper identifies a total of seven salient characteristics related to the methods, which are used to show commonalities and differences between techniques and to chart promising areas for future research.

2011

The design of role-playing games (RPGs) is very complex, involving an intricate interweaving of narrative, quest design, and level design. As an important means for conveying the game's story, quests dictate the setting and contents of levels. Levels provide challenges for the player to overcome in the service of completing quests, and their structure can invite the inclusion of certain kinds of quests. This paper presents an analysis of design patterns present in existing RPGs that aims to better understand such relationships.

Game Dynamics, 2017

This chapter portrays the historical and mathematical background of dynamic and procedural content generation (PCG). We portray and compare various PCG methods and analyze which mathematical approach is suited for typical applications in game design. In the next step, a structural overview of games applying PCG as well as types of PCG is presented. As abundant PCG content can be overwhelming, we discuss context-aware adaptation as a way to adapt the challenge to individual players’ requirements. Finally, we take a brief look at the future of PCG.

2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2012, 2012

Adventure videogames have the player assume the role of protagonist in an interactive story, which is primarily driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. A major drawback with this genre is minimal replayability, since the player has already seen what there is to explore, and knows how to solve the puzzles. We propose a technique to generate variations on puzzles that fit in the same location in the original story, and therefore don't require fully procedural story generation. We keep a database of smart terrain items, which can have effects on other items. Puzzles are generated by taking advantage of a duality between puzzle-solving and generation. Once we build smart terrain causality chains (STCCs) of puzzle solutions, a puzzle known to be solvable can be generated by simply inserting the items contained in a causality chain into the environment. We demonstrate this technique in an experimental videogame, Space Dust, which shows that even a very short adventure game can produce multiple interesting playthroughs when STCC-based puzzle generation is added.

2015

A level designer typically creates the levels of a game to cater for a certain set of objectives, or mission. But in procedural content generation, it is common to treat the creation of missions and the generation of levels as two separate concerns. This often leads to generic levels that allow for various missions. However, this also creates a generic impression for the player, because the potential for synergy between the objectives and the level is not utilised. Following up on the mission-space generation concept, as described by Dormans, we explore the possibilities of procedurally generating a level from a designer-made mission. We use a generative grammar to transform a mission into a level in a mixed-initiative design setting. We provide two case studies, dungeon levels for a rogue-like game, and platformer levels for a metroidvania game. The generators differ in the way they use the mission to generate the space, but are created with the same tool for content generation bas...