Procedural Generation of Content for Online Role Playing Games

• Main Author: Doran, Jonathon
• Other Authors: Parberry, Ian
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2014
• Subjects: MMORPG; procedural content generator; role playing game; content on-demand; Computer games > Programming.; Fantasy games.; Role playing.
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc700051/

Video game players demand a volume of content far in excess of the ability of game designers to create it. For example, a single quest might take a week to develop and test, which means that companies such as Blizzard are spending millions of dollars each month on new content for their games. As a result, both players and developers are frustrated with the inability to meet the demand for new content. By generating content on-demand, it is possible to create custom content for each player based on player preferences. It is also possible to make use of the current world state during generation, something which cannot be done with current techniques. Using developers to create rules and assets for a content generator instead of creating content directly will lower development costs as well as reduce the development time for new game content to seconds rather than days. This work is part of the field of computational creativity, and involves the use of computers to create aesthetically pleasing game content, such as terrain, characters, and quests. I demonstrate agent-based terrain generation, and economic modeling of game spaces. I also demonstrate the autonomous generation of quests for online role playing games, and the ability to play these quests using an emulated Everquest server.