Jul 01
I’d like to talk for a bit about procedural narrative, which has been an important feature (probably the central feature) of the GearHead series since its inception. But first, a song. By the time this gets to you the language will be nonsense, words all lose their meaning by the time they leave the tongue. …
Jan 14
I made a video this morning to show off the new procedural narrative system I’m developing for GearHead Caramel. The Challenge system is a further refinement of the Mechanical Tarot, which was based on Smart Terrain Causality Chains. Its big difference from those systems is the fact that instead of linking interactions to lead to …
May 23
It’ll be easy, I thought. Just throw some widgets together to link boilerplate code and you’ll be finished in a week. I really need to stop listening to my stupid brain. Anyhow, I’ve been working on a GearHead Caramel scenario editor! In theory, this should allow players to create scenarios for GearHead Caramel without knowing …
May 09
I have just done an upgrade of the Mechanical Tarot scenario generator, and I think it’s ready for prime time. The concept behind the Mechanical Tarot is that various NPCs, factions, locations, and props get “Cards” attached to them. These cards define the role of whatever they’re attached to, and also define how this thing …
Jun 12
In previous GearHead games, dialogue trees had to be constructed manually. Each NPC could have an assigned dialogue tree, and random plots could override this with their own dialogue tree. This worked well but was labor intensive and somewhat inflexible. GearHead Caramel does things a bit differently. When a conversation starts, a list of all …
May 14
The last big part of GearHead Caramel that I need to work out before making a release is the mechanical tarot system. It’s sort of but not exactly a random story generator, since the idea is for it to create an interactive situation rather than a sequence of events. Sort of like the difference between …
Sep 11
I’ve been working on a paper doll type portrait construction system for GearHead Caramel. This is the first randomly generated portrait created by the system; the player will also be able to use the portrait generator to customize their character. Once I have randomized NPCs up and running I’ll be able to start work on …
Feb 26
The GearHead Caramel mission generator uses basically the same random story generation process as the GearHead2 core story, but since you can play through Winter Mocha in about ten minutes it makes a much better demonstration model. This story generator uses what I call Propp’s Ratchet. Vladimir Propp was a Russian folklorist who broke folk …
Jan 24
To briefly recap part one, one way to create a random story generator is to write a whole lot of story fragments, arrange a subset of the fragments into a list, and count on your player’s sense of closure to assemble the list into a coherent story. In this part I’m going to look at …
Jan 16
I’ve decided to document my experiments in random story generation, in the hope that these notes will be helpful to other developers and hobbyists. This first post will define some of the terms I’ll be using and introduce some of the theory. My first idea for a random story generator came during a literary criticism …
Recent Comments