Creating Dreamlike Game Worlds Through Procedural Content Generation

This article describes the process of designing a point-and-click adventure game that aimed at using dream logic as the basis to create its narrative puzzles. The technical solution to tackle this challenge was using Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as the design approach, which was used expressively to recreate the instability and changeability of dreams. Although PCG brought about replayability to the game, called Symon, it also created a series of other development problems, which had to be remedied through other design devices. One of the lessons learned during the development of the game is that PCG is not a blanket solution to problems, but rather an expressive tool to be used in combination to other design strategies; human factors are also key both during the development and reception of narrative video games.