Designing a Combined World and Story Procedural Content Generation Engine

Abstract

Procedural content generation (PCG) has seen relative widespread adoption in games and game development. While PCG methods are gaining traction in commercial games, there are comparatively fewer cases where PCG has been used to generate the game world, characters, and the narrative for a single game. We present our research, collaborating with a small independent game studio, on the design of a game engine designed to generate a world, characters, supporting quests and overarching narrative content for their upcoming game. We discuss our choice of game artificial intelligence algorithms, decisions made in designing our system, and our progress and implementation under the constraints and requirements given to us. We posit our system will generate a rich game world with an explainable world history for players to explore and quests to complete. We believe that our engine will meet their requirements increasing the replayability of the game, reducing the authorship burden, while providing the authors with significant control over quest and narrative structure.

Publication
Experimental AI for Games Workshop (EXAG) 2021