Non-player character personality and social connection generation

Abstract

Increasing the behavioral nuance and interactivity of non-player characters in story worlds comes with a growing cost in the time and effort expended by authors. This paper proposes a system, Cast Affinity Satisfiability Toolkit (CAST), which uses answer set programming to lessen this burden while supporting author autonomy. CAST uses user-defined constraints about personality facets and interests to generate a cast of characters and their relationships. Once salient personality facets and character interests are defined, additional constraints may be supplied about character similarity and affinity. This refines not only character personality but the social connections between characters. Rules about affinity, or the attraction characters feel towards each other, may be used to weight personality facets and interests to generate consistent characters and their relationships that consider the significance of these traits. Although the quality of output is contingent upon the quality of constraints, CAST respects all author supplied constraints and provides the framework to generate NPCs that are consistent and whose relationships are tailored to reflect what is significant in the story world.