Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System

Abstract

This project tackles procedural generation of narrative puzzles found in adventure games. The challenge is not only generating the puzzles in games which traditionally only have one walkthrough, but also making the development process accessible to designers. Given that the goal is to make these games playable and easy to develop, the focus of this project is facilitating the immediate development of these games. This paper describes the system of procedural generation of one game, Symon, which was the reference and inspiration for a standalone toolset, the Puzzle Dice System to create other adventure games with procedurally generated puzzles. The toolset has been put to the test with another game, Stranded in Singapore, and it is still being expanded and improved on at the moment of writing.