Design Procedurally generated story (and quest lines)

Psycho_666

Member
Hey.
I'm new to the forums, so nice to see you all :)
Now with the pleasantries out of the way, let's talk about my project.
It's a general design thing. No code or anything. It's just some thoughts...
I am making entirely procedurally generated world, in which you play king as royally as a king can be. Meaning you don't move your butt...
You have your spies and knights and whatever. You send them on a mission and tell them what to do. If they have the skills and doesn't get killed by thieves or whatever, they will do it. Or they will betray your Kingdom and join the enemy.
Now my idea is to also create short history of the world, based on the generated map.
For example, the generator will make a map with no dark elves. The short history may state, that there was a global catastrophic event, that wiped out the entire dark elf race, or let's say the Great War of the 5-th age put the orcs against the dark elfs. And here we are, no dark elfs anymore. Basically procedurally generated lore.
That will also tie up into a procedu... PG questlines.
The global catastrophic event may actually be a monster inside the earth causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. So there could be a long long long questline, that ends with defeating the the monster to prevent new catastrophy.
So there are a couple questions in my mind.
1. Is that too ambitious? I mean it haven't been done yet, and it doesn't sound that difficult to do. It's just cross-referenced spreadsheets. I am working alone, and to me it seems absolutely feasible.
2. Will that make the game kinda... generic? I mean there will not be anything overarching, each map is it's own thing. Will that make the game looking like it have no true identity?

Any thoughts are welcome.
 
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Wraithious

Guest
That sounds like a great project! I believe it's feasible to do, for the random generation you could have areas populated with random rooms, defined with different events that could happen and groups of areas that can work together. So lf a random room is generated with a treasure or a secret door, or whatever it is, then some of those could send you to a random area from a similar group of areas that support that output scenario, or alter the conditions required to move to an area group, or power up character, it opens many possibilities.
 

Psycho_666

Member
Well, that's the basic idea, yes.
Your kingness will have explorers, that will be more likely to find those hidden secrets. Your Knight will go for the battle, not really the exploration and secrets. The spy will avoid both and go for specific target or something...
And yes, the dungeons are generated in that way. Your other characters will rarely see any other level that the first one. The Explorer will go to the rest of them and reveal secrets and many explorers will die in the process...

So you don't think it's unfeasible?

The main issue is, it will require a lot of content. Many races, many events, many quest lines... Basically a lot of data entry work...
 

sylvain_l

Member
procedurally generated quest isn't a new thing. But I find it really interesting.
Even basic procedurally dungeon crawler have sometimes quests things (ok most of the time limited to the apoticarian asking to kill the merchant, or collect ingredients, .. so not much depth).
Daily Chthonicle as far as I know generate its stories that you have to uncover (or at least die trying :p and your actions have an impact on the end of the story). I also remember playing a game in the line of the book you are the hero with the plot being randomly generated each play. So for me it's pretty doable.
paradox grand strategy games have their storyline englued by a lot of rules, but you can still manage to alter it.

at the end it's not that different that for a procedural world generator. It better if your world get some logic in how it is build. for example snow is in colder region in north/pole region of the planet. that rivers flow down from mountain/high preciptitations region to lower region into a lake or to the ocean. At the end you need variety in your biomes. I mean you can even have floating islands in the sky, and any fantasy you want, as long as you manage to make it plausible in your world to the player ;)

Same goes for stories/quests. And yeh, adding complexity/variety/depth while ensuring a good balance/consistency should be fun(I mean nightmarish fun XD)
 

Psycho_666

Member
So it have been done before? Interesting. I feel better now, cause it's definitely not unfeasible.
floating islands in the sky
Damn... I should have thought of that before... And with the idea of the visualization I have that would look awesome.
It better if your world get some logic in how it is build.
That's why I want to make a short world history - basically to justify any quirks, that the generation may have. But then I liked the idea more and more, so now it's a basis for the rest of the game.
 
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MishMash

Guest
I love games that try to do this, and I think its definitely something you should give a go! Your approach sounds ideal in that you are having simple interactions occur dynamically and progressively, and deriving context from them after the fact. The idea of spies betraying you is pretty cool haha! It's also great to see how early decisions could come back to bite you.

We were in a similar position with our project. We wanted to do procedurally generated story-line and quest, however we realized that in our case, this was a bit too forced, and yeah, would have likely lead to things being repetitive. What we have instead opted to do, is to create a series of events that can occur at random within the world, and a series of quests that can be given to the player. However rather than giving the player a set story, the "story" is instead formed by the decisions the player chooses to make, with all the content that is available.

The game is reactive to that, so the way certain mechanics work, or how small events pan out is purely based on context. There is no such pre-planning of a story so to speak, just the game offering random content as it goes, and thus the player ends up with a story based on how they choose to play the game, rather than us shoehorning them into playing in a certain way.

The one trick we do have however to create the sense of story line is to look back over the major events that took place (i.e. the ones the player visited), and generate diary entries based on what the player has seen. Even though there is plenty more going on in the world, the story is purely based on the choices and actions of that player, which I think is where the fun comes from in these procedural games. You give the player a bunch of things they could be getting on with, and a couple of random things happening around the world and see what they make of it.

Yes, you can move the problem and then say "well, the events themselves could get repetitive". This is true, however the same goes for any aspect of a procedurally generated game, it just depends on there being sufficient variety, and sufficient intermediate mechanics such that the player doesn't really have to think like that. (If you think of spore for example, they used a similar approach, however there weren't all that many side mechanics that you could enjoy in your down time, so it just ended up feeling repetitive. However, for me, games like minecraft dont really feel repetitive, because you can play it in so many different ways).

Final words, I think that attempting to generate quest lines in advance could be a bit of a problem. As others have said, it simply requires a huge variety of things, when instead, it can be more interesting to simply expose more mechanics to the player, and have interactions of those dictate progress in a sense. Without incredibly careful design, and lots of potential avenue's, it'll be hard to make quest lines feel meaningful, and chaining them may just make the order feel too forced, or predictable patterns may occur. In our game, we are simply keeping quests relatively independent. Which quests you get offered is dependent on context, NPC relationship etc; however we don't chain main quests back-to-back, simply because it would require a crazy number of quests to make it feel good, when I feel having a smaller number of major, but better thought out quests is better than lots of simple ones that chain together.
I guess you can potentially do things with having quests branch within themselves, however that can also sometimes feel odd, as the flexibility will cause you to limit what a quest can do, and just have it result in being overly simple/dull. (i.e. just a list of simple chores: "Kill this thing", "Do this", "Do that")
 

Psycho_666

Member
However rather than giving the player a set story, the "story" is instead formed by the decisions the player chooses to make
What I want to do is exactly the same. However I want to give the player some brief history of the world, not really force them to play a specific way. I just want to give the player constext as to why the map looks the way it looks, why there are the races there are, etc etc.
attempting to generate quest lines in advance could be a bit of a problem
I agree... But then again, not all questlines will be generated in advance. There may be a couple questlines, but only those, connected to the generated history of the world, like uncovering a mystery or finding an ancient artifact or something like that. There will still be the standard stuff, where the player can basically do whatever.

You are basically reading my mind. The things you are telling me are similar to what I want to do anyways, so we are basically doing the same game, just I do it alone as a pet project and you seems to have a team and actually do this seriously. But yes, I don't want to force the player to do anything. He may even ignore the quest if he likes to. What the player won't be able to ignore is the kingdom he runs, so that will be the meat of the game. The brief history will be more of a context for the world.
The idea of spies betraying you is pretty cool haha!
Oh, everyone will be able to betray you. If the enemy give them what they want and you don't. Everyone will have it's free will. Just because you send the priest to convert some heretics to your faith doesn't mean they will not convert him, if his faith is low and their faith is stronger...

@Snayff , that's quite the read :) Thank you.
 
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