Alex Baird
Software Development
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Procedural Systems for Non-Combat Role-Playing Games
The artifact created for my thesis is a chose this project as I had an interest
system. The thesis took roughly six or generation outside of map and dungeon
non-combat role-playing game creation
seven months to develop and write.
Characters, dialogue, quests and
associated components are read in
from XML, and are used to procedurally
generate the content for the game. The
procedurally generated content includes
generation. I was interested in procedural
generation as it can extend the life of a
game exponentially, depending on how
well polished and how much content the
game has to work with.
the characters and quests, which in turn This was beneficial to me as it helped me
in various ways. the concept of procedural generation.
affect the dialogue the player encounters
My thesis paper goes over the content
created for the artifact in greater detail,
as well as research into ways to use
procedural generation in games. I
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in exploring more uses for procedural
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
develop my skills further, and deeply learn
One useful thing I learned was the
importance of writing an example XML file
before writing the code that reads it, as
it makes it easier and cleaner to develop
said code.