Procedural generation of branching quests for games

Abstract

The production of high-quality digital games usually requires a few hundred individuals, including designers, artists, and story writers. Currently, development teams are increasingly applying procedural content generation techniques to reduce their work overload. However, there is a lack of methods to handle the procedural generation of branching quests that can support the richness of the digital games’ mutable and highly interactive virtual worlds. The challenges to maintaining a rich and coherent game narrative are enormous. In this work, we present a novel procedural quest generation method that can produce coherent quests with branching storylines for dynamic and interactive game worlds. By combining automated planning with a genetic algorithm guided by story arcs, the proposed method can generate coherent branching quests based on a narrative structure. Preliminary results show that the branching quests created with our approach are nearly at par with those made by professional game designers.