Story Designer: Towards a Mixed-Initiative Tool to Create Narrative Structures

Alberto Alvarez, Jose Font, Julian Togelius

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    Narratives are a predominant part of games, and their design poses challenges when identifying, encoding, interpreting, evaluating, and generating them. One way to address this would be to approach narrative design in a more abstract layer, such as narrative structures. This paper presents Story Designer, a mixed-initiative co-creative narrative structure tool built on top of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD) that uses tropes, narrative conventions found across many media types, to design these structures. Story Designer uses tropes as building blocks for narrative designers to compose complete narrative structures by interconnecting them in graph structures called narrative graphs. Our mixed-initiative approach lets designers manually create their narrative graphs and feeds an underlying evolutionary algorithm with those, creating quality-diverse suggestions using MAP-Elites. Suggestions are visually represented for designers to compare and evaluate and can then be incorporated into the design for further manual editions. At the same time, we use the levels designed within EDD as constraints for the narrative structure, intertwining both level design and narrative. We evaluate the impact of these constraints and the system's adaptability and expressiveness, resulting in a potential tool to create narrative structures combining level design aspects with narrative.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationProceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022
    EditorsKostas Karpouzis, Stefano Gualeni, Allan Fowler
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450397957
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Sep 5 2022
    Event17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022 - Athens, Greece
    Duration: Sep 5 2022Sep 8 2022

    Publication series

    NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

    Conference

    Conference17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022
    Country/TerritoryGreece
    CityAthens
    Period9/5/229/8/22

    Keywords

    • Graph Grammars
    • Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity
    • Narrative Structure
    • Procedural Content Generation
    • Story Generation

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Software
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
    • Computer Networks and Communications

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