Multi-agent Story-based Settlement Generation

Jonathan Demke, Robert Morain, Connor Wilhelm, Dan Ventura

Abstract: Video game content creation is a creative task that has typically been performed by 3D artists. While procedurally generated worlds provide the opportunity to create arbitrarily large cohesive environments, if the generated content lacks an integrated narrative, the environment may begin to feel generic and auto-generated; human artists can use story narratives to help them create 3D worlds which feel more "alive". This paper describes the StoryViz system which uses a short story as inspiration for generating a 3D settlement in Minecraft, leveraging swarm intelligence to optimize a set of rule-based interest functions. A user survey evaluating the system’s generated settlements provides a baseline for further development of the story visualization task.