El Proceso Sol-Gel: Principios básicos.

Playing Games

When sizes of CRPGs have grown to their current forms, the authorial bur- den to create game content has also reached unequalled limits. Special rea- sons why CRPGs generally need more content development time than games from other genres include huge game worlds with dozens of NPCs and long, branching game storylines. Personalization of the game content is also typ- ical only for CRPGs, since the desire for a personalized gaming experience originates from PnP RPGs.

2.8.1

Content Creation Problem

Content is most of what is contained in a game: levels, maps, game rules, textures, stories, items, quests, music, weapons, vehicles, characters etc. However the game engine itself is not considered to be content. Further, non-player character behaviour – NPC AI – is not considered to be content either [76].

Personalization of CRPG increases the application developers’ work for creating CRPGs. This is understandable as even a simple branching of the storyline multiplies the needed development input by the number of branches. Modern CRPGs have often multiple endings and sometimes also separate tu-

torials for different character classes. Instead of complete branching or cre- ating different quests, intermediate forms can also be used, where some parts of the quests are modified based on the player character. These intermediate forms require less development work than branches, because part of content can be reused.

Content generation is a method for reducing the application developer work when developing CRPGs. Term procedural generation is used to refer content generation taking place algorithmically. Content generation tool or algorithm can use an initialisation file as the basis of the generation. If attributes or other data of the player character are used in the generation process, these tools can also produce personalized content.

Generally content of the game can be generated either at development time or at run-time. Both of these methods have their advantages. Content generated at development time can be evaluated by game developers and the process can be run again until the outcome is the desired one. When using run-time generation the content is generated only when it is needed in the game (it does not need to be shipped with the game), and in theory new content can be created endlessly.

2.8.2

Personalization Problem

A main reason why people play any kind of role-playing games is to have a personalized character, which the player can identify with. The creation of this character can vary from rolling the dice and writing the background story for character (PnP RPGs) to sewing character’s cloths (LARPs). In CRPGs the player has usually some control in creating his or her character, but not as much as in other formats.

The fun of having a personalized character is lost, however, if it has no effect in the game. Personalizing the player experience is a key factor to make the player feel involved in the virtual world of the game [84]. Unfortunately, the personalized player experience of PnP RPGs is one of the most difficult properties for CRPGs to emulate. Computers need explicit instructions to create similar personalized playing experience that human game masters in

PnP RPGs create. In PnP RPGs a human game master is familiar with the player character, and can create personalized adventures on the fly. To a computer, the player character is a bunch of numbers, and this data collection is what game programmers must use to when giving explicit instructions for creating personalized adventures to a computer.

The lack of personalization is also discussed in [69], where Sullivan et al. point out that CRPGs have general lack of density of interesting and meaningful choices for the player character within the story. They also point out that complex character creation systems of CRPGs have no effect on the story beyond a few word replacements.

If a storyline of CRPG adapts to the player actions, the player is given these meaningful choices. This adaptation is done by opening quests and thus new storyline branches based on the 1) explicit choices the player character makes during the storyline and 2) implicit choices that the player character has made during the storyline or in the character creation. An example of an implicit choice could be choosing a special ability or skill when gaining a new level.

Individual quests are basic building blocks of the storyline, so personal- ization of quests is important. Special quests for different character classes can take advantage of special skills of the class. In all, personalized quests shift the game towards the same player experience as PnP RPGs offer, which is one purpose of CRPGs.

Publication [II] presents guidelines for personalizing the player experience in CRPGs. It is divided into three parts covering personalizing: 1) the game storyline, 2) game characters, and 3) game difficulty. We present that use of these guidelines can improve the personalized player experience offered in CRPGs. However, as presented in the paper, when the guidelines are used and more personalization is gained, also the authorial burden to create these personalized stories is increased. Correspondingly, tool support for content generation can be used to used reduce this authorial work.

Chapter 3

Software Tools in Game

Development

Human history is a history of tool usage. From the days of first agricultur- alist people, tools have played a significant part in human civilization. It is generally accepted that the versatile use of tools is specific to humans, al- though many animal species are able to use primitive tools [41]. Modern tools are not always concrete physical instruments and different kinds of software tools are an important part of software development. In software develop- ment generally, term software tool is used to refer to a piece of software used to assist in the development of other software being build [39].

Software tools play a very important role in game programming. Mod- ern computer game development projects are enormous software projects, typically including 20–50 professionals and lasting two years to be a com- plete product [67]. In addition to common software development tools such as compilers, debuggers, and integrated development environments (IDEs), there are also numerous specific tools used in game programming. For exam- ple, game engines, code generators, modelling tools (referred also as digital content creation (DCC) applications [25]), and physics engines are available. On top of ready-made game programming tools, new special tools, e.g., spe- cific level editors or AI tools are implemented in many game projects. These

tools can later be reused to implement similar games. Figure 3.1 shows software tools commonly used in CRPG project.

Game Engine Script File Script File Script File Modeling Tool

Game Specific Part of CRPG AI Engine

Scripting Engine Content

Generator

Game World

Figure 3.1: Common software tools in CRPG