Towards Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles for Adventure Games

Abstract

Narrative puzzles involve exploration, logical thinking and progressing a story. This paper presents a narrative design innovation in the form of a system for the procedural generation of such puzzles for use in story-rich games or games with large open worlds. The approach uses an extended type of context-free grammar as the basis for both the generation algorithm and the puzzle solving. Each designer-defined rule in the grammar defines a possible behavior of item types in the game world. Puzzles are generated at runtime on a per area basis, through recursive generation of inputs for outputs. Given a valid grammar, the system guarantees that its puzzles are solvable.