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Design / Re: Story Driven Roguelike (Based on the Hero's Journey)

« on: October 27, 2014, 12:10:10 AM »

I don't see this so much as a game I'm producing which people will play upon release, more an experimental game design, answering the question "can a computer write a story?" Of course the system would be made open source, and I would hope through collaboration, people could create a system which writes compelling, diverse, and emotional stories- i don't think the difficulty with it is so much the fundamental algorithms involved, but more the amount of content required. It would needs lists upon lists of words to put into flavor text, and synonyms for those words, and prefixes and suffixes for names to create a diverse population, categories for stories and encounters and chapters and such to fit into, which is where the open source nature of this project would allow it to shine.

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Design / Story Driven Roguelike (Based on the Hero's Journey)

« on: October 26, 2014, 10:09:36 PM »

So I recently had the idea to create a "roguelike" (don't know if it should technically be called that) that works in a similar way to the classic choose your own adventure books. Essentially, I'd have an algorithm which would generate a random "adventure seed", for example "The king of Storyland has recently been saved and the kingdom thrown into turmoil." The game would then branch that out into a number of chapters based on a predefined length. Each chapter would have a number of possible outcomes, which would grow as the story progresses (the first chapter could have three outcomes, so maybe the player decides to raise an army to reclaim the throne, seek dilpomacy, etc. The second would then have 3 outcomes for each outcome in the first chapter, so 9 outcomes, the next would have 27, and so on) until the final chapter, which would have a constant number of outcomes (for example, if the final chapter had three outcomes it could result in peace being brought back to the kindom, failure in the heros quest, or death of the hero).   Each chapter would be broken up into a number of "encounters", which would be lines of text describing a specific event (for example, the player enters the cave of Crombul and encounters the beast Crombul) The encounter would then have a set of choices, which would be what effect the direction the story goes (do you fight Crombul? Do you run from Crombul? Do you attempt diplomacy with Crombul?) In my vision of this game, after completion of the quest, an epic poem in the style of the Odyssey or Beowulf would be given to the player detailing the journey of the hero, so that they may share it with their friends

I think the algorithm would be based on Campbell's "The Heros Journey".  I know random generation of worlds is quite a simple task (check out http://donjon.bin.sh/), and concepts from his "Random Adventure Generator" could be easily extrapolated. It would take quite some time, but what do you all think of the concept? Has it been done before? What do you think of a computer's ability to pull off this task? Would the system be too complex to be fun? I know if it's poorly designed, the game would be exceptionally boring with vanilla plots, but i believe that if one could come up with a vast array of categories for stories, chapters, and encounters that would act as a skeleton for the quest, as well as a strong name generation algorithm, it can be done. As it stands, i plan to work on my own basic version of this as a sort of Viking saga type thing.