To make sense of dungeons

Abstract: Together with the growth of procedural content generation in game development, there is a need for a viable generation method of procedural context to make sense of the content within game space. Previous research discusses how interactivity and narrative are almost opposite of each other and when combined needs to be generated in two steps, one for the game space and the other for context. We propose procedural narrative as context through objectives, as a useful means to structure content in games. In this paper we present and describe an artefact developed as a sub-system to the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD), that procedurally generates objectives for the dungeons created with the tool. The artefact is developed with macro patterns which can be defined as an extension of the existing meso patterns in EDD. The macro patterns are used to generate objectives in the rooms of the dungeons, and the system evaluates the priority of the room objectives based on the design of the dungeon and the quality of the objective to maximize the usage of game space and create a suitable narrative. The work for this thesis and its artefact resulted in a successful expansion on the knowledge of procedural narrative generation by presenting macro patterns as a viable solution for contextualization of procedural game content.