Week 4 (13/10/2024 - 19/10/2024) Procedural Narratives

This week will be discovering procedural stories, including story design and procedural stories. Learning how important Procedural Storytelling is to games and the Procedural Narrative tools used in game engines.

The Procedural Narrative

According to McRae (n.d.), Procedural Narrative is a design technique in which a game's story is made up of many different parts that can be assembled, experienced, and interpreted in many different sequences and ways.

Procedural narratives are an approach to storytelling in games or media in which the story is generated through algorithms and programming processes, rather than being written statically. The story changes according to the player's actions or pre-determined factors in the system.

There is a simple example in Unity that can demonstrate this. By using simple code in Unity, adding a different output to the button. 

The first step is to make a method for message 1 and message 2. Then, put this method in a button to display the result and see if the result is as expected.

Figure 1 and 2: Demonstration of procedural narratives created by the author using simple code in Unity

When the player clicks the up button to play the text "ok," the player clicks the down button to play the text "ok2."

Source: Created by Juclachak Juntasilp, 2024.

The Importance of Narration in Video Games

Narrative is one of the most important components of a game. It can be used to determine the outcome of the player or the story in the game by player action. Good storytelling is the main engine that makes a game more interesting. Most top-tier games have a robust story structure, making players thirst to know the background of the character and the storyline in the game. For instance, Undertale was widely acclaimed and won multiple awards after its release in 2015. The reason why this game has received so many awards is its great storyline and presentation.

Figure 1: Screenshot or artwork from Undertale (Fox, no date).

Procedural Narrative in Game Engine

One example is a tool in Unity called the "Dialogue System." This tool can be used to write NPC interactions, give quests, or even create character dialogue cutscenes. Here are a few of the most popular games that use this device and are widely accepted in the video game world.

Figure 2: Image from Procedural Narratives by DAWOOD, Z. (2024).

Update on The Maze Generator

The maze generator has been moved to a new git called "My-CT7120-Procedural-Generation-Algorithms-Project," followed by all the examples of this module.

Figure 3: Screenshot of the project migration process to a new repository on GitHub, captured by the author (Juntasilp, J., 2024).

Reference

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1. DAWOOD, Z., 2024. Procedural Narratives. PowerPoint presentation. Available at: https://connectglosac-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/s2105341_glos_ac_uk/EXK0QxOrLfRFqWpOXTu6Jv4B4dDjWO8U-hH_cgz8GBJ07Q?e=ZcoRP4 (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

2. DAWOOD, Z., 2024. Image from: Procedural Narratives. PowerPoint presentation. Available at: https://connectglosac-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/s2105341_glos_ac_uk/EXK0QxOrLfRFqWpOXTu6Jv4B4dDjWO8U-hH_cgz8GBJ07Q?e=ZcoRP4 (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

3. Fox, T. (n.d.) Image from: Undertale. Available at: https://undertale.com/ (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

4. IndieCade (2015) IndieCade Award Winners 2015. Available at: https://www.indiecade.com/ (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

5. Valve Corporation (2017) Steam Awards 2017 Winners. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/SteamAwards/ (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

6. Short, E. (2016) Procedural Narrative Generation in Games. Available at: https://www.gamasutra.com (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

7. Unity Technologies (no date) MonoBehaviour.InvokeRepeating. Available at: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.InvokeRepeating.html (Accessed: 23 November 2024).

8. Juntasilp, J. (2024) CT7120 Procedural Generation Algorithms Project. Available at: https://github.com/jino1113/My-CT7120-Procedural-Generation-Algorithms-Project/tree/main (Accessed: 13 October 2024).

9. Juntasilp, J. (2024) Procedural Narratives Using Simple Code in Unity. Available at: https://youtu.be/8tyjmyazJ_g (Accessed: 24 November 2024).

10. McRae, E. (n.d.) What’s the difference between procedural narrative and emergent narrative? Available at: https://www.edmcrae.com/article/whats-the-difference-between-procedural-narrative-and-emergent-narrative (Accessed: 10 December 2024).