Deriving Quests from Open World Mechanics

Open world games present players with more freedom than games with linear progression structures. However, without clearly-defined objectives, they often leave players without a sense of purpose. Most of the time, quests and objectives are hand-authored and overlaid atop an open world's mechanics. But what if they could be generated organically from the gameplay itself? The goal of our project was to develop a model of the mechanics in Minecraft that could be used to determine the ideal placement of objectives in an open world setting. We formalized the game logic of Minecraft in terms of logical rules that can be manipulated in two ways: they may be executed to generate graphs representative of the player experience when playing an open world game with little developer direction; and they may be statically analyzed to determine dependency orderings, feedback loops, and bottlenecks. These analyses may then be used to place achievements on gameplay actions algorithmically.Comment: To appear at Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 201

Key and Lock puzzles in Procedural Gameplay

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Science in Information Design & Technology, School of Literature, Communication and Culture, Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of TechnologyThis project is an attempt to model and simulate key and lock puzzles in the style of Shigeru Miyamoto games, specifically the Zelda and Metroid series. Much of the gameplay in these titles is oriented around encountering obstacles, and then locating an item that allows the player to circumvent the obstacle. The project is built on top of Charbitat, another project built on Unreal Tournament 2004, which produces procedurally generated space in response to the player's actions.Michael Nitsche (Chair), Ian Bogost, Michael Matea

Principles of Emergent Design in Online Games: Mermaids Phase 1 Prototype

This paper outlines the first phase prototype of Mermaids, a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) being developed by Georgia Tech’s Emergent Game Group {EGG}. We describe Mermaids in the context of the group’s research mission, to develop specific games, techniques and design features that promote large-scale emergent social behavior in multiplayer games. We also discuss some of the innovative design features of the Mermaids game, and describe the rapid prototyping and iterative development process that enabled us to create a working prototype in a relatively short period of time on a zero budget project using a student-based development team. We also discuss the special challenges encountered when trying to develop a nontraditional game, one of whose stated research goals is to interrogate MMOG conventions, using a relatively conventional game engine

The Quest in a Generated World

As procedural content becomes a more appealing option for game development, procedurally determined context is necessary to structure and make sense of this content. We find that a useful means to structure content in 3D games is the quest. The task of generating necessary context then becomes one of quest generation. This paper describes how we implemented a basic quest generator based on key and lock puzzles into a procedural game world. It uses notion of quest as spatial progression and discusses the design of the game world and how our quest generator connects to it. Its findings are twofold: on the technical level we managed to implement a highly flexible content and context generator into an existing game engine; one the content level we can trace signs for higher player interest in quest-enhance

Authoring an Interactive Narrative with Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management

Drama managers reconfigure a game in reaction to a player's actions. In declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM), a game's story is abstracted as a sequence of plot points; possible drama manager interventions are abstracted as a set of DM actions. The author defines an func- tion evaluating story quality, and some optimization method (currently reinforcement learning) chooses DM actions so as to maximize expected story quality according to that evaluation function. While previous work has developed this ap- proach at a technical level and discussed its potential applications, no work to date has used DODM to write real games. We report on our experiences designing a game in the Neverwinter Nights engine, entitled The Guilty, in which we use DODM to create a dynamic plot that in a previous design iteration we had found difficult to create with other techniques

Authoring an Interactive Narrative with Declarative Optimization Based Drama Management

Abstract Drama managers reconfigure a game in reaction to a player's actions. In declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM), a game's story is abstracted as a sequence of plot points; possible drama manager interventions are abstracted as a set of DM actions. The author defines an function evaluating story quality, and some optimization method (currently reinforcement learning) chooses DM actions so as to maximize expected story quality according to that evaluation function. While previous work has developed this approach at a technical level and discussed its potential applications, no work to date has used DODM to write real games. We report on our experiences designing a game in the Neverwinter Nights engine, entitled The Guilty, in which we use DODM to create a dynamic plot that in a previous design iteration we had found difficult to create with other techniques

Authoring an Interactive Narrative with Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management ∗

Drama managers reconfigure a game in reaction to a player’s actions. In declarative optimization-based drama management (DODM), a game’s story is abstracted as a sequence of plot points; possible drama manager interventions are abstracted as a set of DM actions. The author defines an function evaluating story quality, and some optimization method (currently reinforcement learning) chooses DM actions so as to maximize expected story quality according to that evaluation function. While previous work has developed this approach at a technical level and discussed its potential applications, no work to date has used DODM to write real games. We report on our experiences designing a game in the Neverwinter Nights engine, entitled The Guilty, in which we use DODM to create a dynamic plot that in a previous design iteration we had found difficult to create with other techniques