Computer Assisted Storytelling:

Many computer storytelling systems have been designed by the academic community, yet none of them have found their way into commercial video games. These storytelling systems have mechanisms for unfolding interactive stories that often take away control over the story from the game designers. This is in direct opposition to the development of modern video games. Systems need to be devised to keep development time to a minimum while allowing for the player to interact in a believable way with the story. This thesis intends to devise a simple computer assisted storytelling system which gives the designers the ability to tailor the story to the actions of the player, while keeping development complexity down and preserving game designer control over the direction of the story.

This project is intended to test out the feasibility of this storytelling system in terms of content creation and overall believability of the resulting story while incorporating player actions. As such, the ideal method of testing this storytelling paradigm for video games is to create a video game which utilizes the techniques discussed so far. Due to the time constraints on completion of such a project and the limiting factor of not having artists or level designers available for content creation, the game must be fairly simplistic. For this reason, a text-based game is being developed.

The game needs to be heavily story-based with story affecting choices available to the player. Many game genres rely heavily on storytelling, though they also rely on other underlying gameplay mechanics. Since the gameplay mechanics are not a focus of this project, there is very little reason to clutter up the storytelling design system with extraneous details. Thus game genres such as RPGs that require complex game mechanics are not well suited for testing out an initial version of this storytelling system. Instead it is proposed that an adventure game that focuses on storytelling over other gameplay mechanics be used as a testbed for this computer assisted story telling system.

The desired results from this project are two-fold. The first is to test out if such a story system which utilizes planning and can cut down on the content creation time normally required for game stories that react to player actions. The second is to see if this storytelling system is flexible enough to be used in commercial video game stories. For this reason, the adventure game which is produced needs to feature a story and interactions which are complex enough to demonstrate the effectiveness of this system.

Utilizing AI techniques such as Goal Oriented Action Planning and A*, I am developing a method for creating stories that change dynamically based on player interaction while still staying true to the designer's story vision

• Created a symbolic story representation based on the concept of locks and keys
• Formulated story elements as keys with preconditions and resultant outcomes
• Implemented an A* search to satisfy the story goals as set forth by a designer