Narrative world creation with assisted environment filling
M.C. Goedegebure (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
E. Eisemann – Mentor
Rafa Bidarra – Mentor
D.J. Broekens – Graduation committee member
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Abstract
Games such as Skyrim use a narrative world, which is a game world that is used to tell stories. Creating narrative worlds is a time-consuming process because of the collaboration of writers, 3D artists and game designers, the story adjusting the world over time and the requirement for diverse and interesting environments. This thesis focuses on solving these problems. First, the manual approach was designed that allows the manual creation of a narrative world,
while focusing on filling environments. Secondly, the assisted approach builds on the manual approach and is able to assist a designer in making the decisions necessary to fill environments. The manual approach uses a set of objects with explicit relationships, created following a modular approach. The manual approach incorporates a discrete and sequential timeline of events, with each event connected to a single location, directly into the process. Several actions are used to fill the narrative world for each point in time of the timeline. The assisted approach offers assistance for each decision of the actions. Due to computational complexity, each decision is assisted independently. The discrete decisions are evaluated and ordered through the use of weighted criteria. The continuous decisions, the placement of objects, requires generation of options, which is done through an adaptation of Merrell et al. [2011]’s GPGPU algorithm. A usability study was conducted to test the effectiveness of the assisted approach compared to the manual approach. Results were collected through a creativity support index (CSI), a questionnaire on the assisted approach and quantitative measurements on object usage and time taken for actions and locations. The manual approach scored better in the CSI results than the assisted approach. The final questionnaire showed that this was caused by automation results not matching the user’s expectations as these differ, at least, per user and location type. The following conclusions are made. First, explicit
relationships allow direct insight in how objects interact. Secondly, the usability study results supports the iterative process employed by, both our, and many other creative process approaches. Finally, in general, it is difficult to provide valuable assistance as expectations differ greatly. The incorporation of uncertainty into the assistance can help lessen this problem.