Dynamic quest generation in Micro Missions

摘要

Most video game stories rely on the story designer anticipating and authoring every choice a player can make with respect to the story, and the consequences of these choices. With this method, a player's sense of agency with respect to the story depends on whether that player's desired story-related actions were anticipated by the authors at the time of the development of the game. Some video games instead create an environment for emergent stories by defining detailed simulations of characters and the world they inhabit. But there are not a lot of video games that actively attempt to direct story while making it dynamic and responsive to player actions. Micro Missions is a mini-game/adventure game with a quest generation system that seeks to increase player agency by reacting to player actions dynamically, at runtime. This system uses a taxonomy of quest archetypes to select and populate quests on demand based on the current world state and current story-related goals. The creation and analysis of the quest generation system is facilitated by the architecture of Micro Missions: all gameplay is separated into modular interactions with discrete outputs, which are organized into strict cause-and-effect trees(or more precisely, directed acyclical graphs).