Sam Davern

Title: Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles

Supervision Team: Mads Haahr, TCD / Marguerite Barry, UCD

Description: Narrative puzzles are puzzles that form part of the progression of a narrative, whose solutions involve exploration and logical as well as creative thinking. They are key components of adventure and story-driven games, and often feature in large open-world games. However, filling large open worlds with engaging content is challenging, especially for games with procedurally generated worlds, such as Minecraft (2011) and No Man’s Sky (2016). Systems exist for generating narrative puzzles procedurally, but they lack context about many narrative elements, such as character motivation, plot progression, dramatic arc, as well as player modelling. This project will improve procedurally generation of narratives for small-scale narrative games as well as large-scale open world games by integrating new types of narrative elements as well as player modelling into the Story Puzzle Heuristics for Interactive Narrative eXperiences (SPHINX) framework, potentially resulting in dynamically generated narratives of increased sophistication and significantly improved player experience.