A Procedurally Generated Approach to Emotional Storytelling for Games and Interactive Systems
One of the least noticeable applications in the area of Procedural Generated Content is in generating narratives. Furthermore, when it tends to be used, it focuses on plot generation. Unfortunately, this results in a disregard for the potential emotional impact that storytelling may bring to table, since that, in many cases, it is the way a narrative is told that results in some sort of emotional resonance for an audience. Through a study of storytelling techniques, together with an analysis of existing narrative-driven PCG systems, and by exploring various manners of emotional evaluation in art, a system was built that takes base narratives as input and, through an emotional model, adds storytelling mechanisms to them, seeking to differentiate and maximize one of two opposite emotional moods: Happy and Dour. These narratives are then played in the Virtual Tutor system. A series of experiments consisting of four different narratives were made to discern if the emotional valence of these was successfully differentiated and maximized.
Skill-based Progression Model for Smash Time
Gone are the days the content of a game was completely created manually and the gameplay was pre-scripted before the game release. Nowadays an increasing number of games use procedurally generated content to provide engaging gaming experiences. Most of the endless single player games generate content based on the difficulty of the challenges combined with the duration of the current game session, which leads to a similar gameplay experience to every player. In this dissertation, we address the problem of keeping the players engaged in a game for longer periods of time. One way to increase the gameplay experience of a game is to increase the feeling of progression. To solve this problem we propose a progression model that creates content based on the player skill. We theorize that, by providing a progression that is adapted to the player based on the player skill, keeping the variety of the challenges will lead to more engaging gameplay experiences. We propose a progression model for the endless level of the mobile game Smash Time. We believe to have created a progression model that is robust and dynamic enough to be used in different games and that excludes the need of using preset difficulty settings. The results from playtests with users suggest that the developed progression model is able to increase the number and duration of the gameplay experiences and has the potential to increase player immersion, creating more engaging gameplay experiences that may, ultimately, increase the overall lifetime of the game itself.
Touch on Chemistry - Game to Teach Organic Chemistry in Virtual Reality
The goal of this thesis is to create a game in Virtual Reality that adds more interactivity to the teaching process of Organic Chemistry. The manipulation of objects takes an central focus in this game since the players will be interacting with atoms and molecules through out the game, and to make this manipulation as natural and easy to use as possible, the Leap Motion sensor was used along side the Virtual Reality technology in the project. The students will use their own hands to interact with the environment in the game and there are different methods that can be used according to the intended purpose. The game consists on creating molecules by connecting atoms together to overcome the challenges presented and progress on the levels. The challenges are based on what high school students learn in their freshman year about Organic Chemistry, and the rules of how molecules are created must be followed. The implementation of the interaction with objects was achieve and all the game development was done in three iterations. It was performed an evaluation at the of the last iteration with high school students to check if the objectives defines were met. The final tests consisted on the users completing the tutorial and the Normal game mode, which was simplified and had four levels with two challenges each. The results were very positive, showing that the game is fun and entertaining, and that it has potential to be a helpful resource in a classroom.
Co-creativity in Videogame Puzzle Creation
This work proposes a solution to improve the cooperation between humans and computer Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a colleague, in the creation of puzzles for video game levels. With this interaction we hope to give the designer a source of creative stimulus, in order to achieve overall more creative results than those obtained if said designer was working alone. The proposed solution consists of a co-creative puzzle creation tool, focused on improving creativity by allowing human and computer to work together in producing content using the Legend of Grimrock 2 Level Editor, exploring the digital “peer” paradigm. Its interface can be used by the designer to preview generated suggestions and orient its behavior. Suggestions are generated and iteratively evolved by three genetic algorithms and can be guided by the designer on different domains: objective, innovation, user map; all then combined in a fourth one that re-evaluates the best suggestions of each previous algorithm, again on the three domains, with different weights based on the users configuration, to choose the best suggestion overall. Results showed a positive influence on the puzzle creation because our approach takes into account the smaller nuances of the co-creative interaction. Outlined improvements such as a better way to support designer-specific interaction patterns, improved algorithm behaviour and integration with past tools set the direction for future work. We concluded that through an intuitive interface, flexible and adjustable behavior, we were able to provide some positive contributions to the quality of the co-creative puzzle creation process.