The Quest in a Generated World

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DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play
The University of Tokyo, September, 2007
Volume: 4
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666


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-enhanced procedural game worlds in comparison to unstructured spaces.