Abstract
Computer games are an important application area for interactive storytelling. In a large subset of games, quests — tasks that the player is assigned to complete — are the primary driving forces of the storyline. The main storyline is usually accompanied by a number of optional side-quests. We present a system for generating side-quests based on chaining simple building blocks, akin to the branching narrative approach to interactive storytelling. Our primary interest was how far can we get with such a simple approach. The simplicity of our system also lets game designers retain more control over the space of possible side-quests, making the system more suitable for mainstream computer games. We implemented the system in an experimental game and compared the quests generated by the system with hand-picked and random sequences of building blocks. We performed two rounds of player evaluation (\(N_{1} = 21\), \(N_{2} = 12\)), which has shown promising results.
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Notes
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A playable version of the system can be downloaded at http://gyfis.itch.io/side-quest-generating-system.
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Acknowledgments
This research is partially supported by the student grant GA UK No. 559813/2013/A-INF/MFF and by SVV project number 260 224.
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Hromada, T., Černý, M., Bída, M., Brom, C. (2015). Generating Side Quests from Building Blocks. In: Schoenau-Fog, H., Bruni, L., Louchart, S., Baceviciute, S. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27036-4_22
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