Let CONAN tell you a story: Procedural quest generation

TL;DR

This paper introduces CONAN, a procedural quest generator that uses planning to create narrative quests based on world states, matching structures found in commercial video games.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel planning-based engine for procedural quest generation that models motivations and replicates commercial game quest structures.

Findings

Engine can generate quests with realistic motivations.

Quest structures align with those in commercial video games.

Different world descriptions influence quest motivations.

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.