Let CONAN tell you a story: Procedural quest generation

Abstract--This work proposes an engine for the Creation Of Novel Adventure Narrative (CONAN), which is a procedural quest generator. It uses a planning approach to story generation. The engine is tested on its ability to create quests, which are sets of actions that must be performed in order to achieve a certain goal, usually for a reward. The engine takes in a world description represented as a set of facts, including characters, locations, and items, and generates quests according to the state of the world and the preferences of the characters. We evaluate quests through the classification of the motivations behind the quests, based on the sequences of actions required to complete the quests. We also compare different world descriptions and analyze the difference in motivations for the quests produced by the engine. Compared against human structural quest analysis, the current engine was found to be able to replicate the quest structures found in commercial video game quests. The creation of media content has always been the domain of humans, be it for movies, music or video games. With advancement in computer technology and research, the creation of such content has seen a slight shift from the human authored to automatic computer generation. Using algorithms to procedurally create media can effectively alleviate some of the burden from artists when creating a new piece. A. Procedural Generation in Games Procedural Content Generation for Games (PCG-G) is the use of computers algorithms to generate game content, determine if it is interesting, and select the best ones on behalf of the players.[1] This type of generation becomes quite useful when trying to produce content for an industry that is more and more demanding in terms of content [1]. For instance, in the current market, game development costs are extremely high as the demand for highly complex games requires the work of many artists and many hours to be met. For instance, the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft has a total of 30,000 items, 5,300 creatures with which to interact and 7600 quests and has an estimated budget of twenty to one hundred and fifty million dollars for a single game [1].