Procedural Content Generation in Educational Game Authoring Tools
Key: MF14-1
Author: Florian Mehm, Alexander Hendrich, Daniel Kauth, Stefan Göbel, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: October 2014
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Academic Conferences Limited
Book title: Proceedings of the European Conference on Game-Based Learning
Abstract: Many genres of digital educational games require vast amounts of content, including several categories of content such as graphical assets, task pools, or story elements. Contemporary games have taken up the practice of procedural content generation, in which algorithms are partly or fully employed to create content from a set of constraints. This practice facilitates the creation of content, lowering production times and costs and increasing the range of possible gameplay experiences. Authoring tools for games are employed for similar benefits: by creating a tool that allows authors to quickly design and produce games without detailed technical knowledge, the game development process is made more accessible and streamlined. In the work presented here, we analyze the possibilities to allow content generation in authoring tools. The major challenges in this lie in the ways in which authors are presented with the procedural generators. The focus here lies on finding a middle ground between an interesting and useful range of possible outputs and a low complexity for the author. Our approach to procedural content generation in authoring tools relies on a game model that is used to model educational games. This model has been successfully realized in the authoring tool StoryTec for digital educational games. We extended this model to not only allow authoring but also generation of content in a similarly simple way. A survey of the different categories of content and associated content generation methods is included. An overview of the resulting architecture demonstrates how content generation can be introduced both in the authoring tool and the game’s runtime environment and which game concepts are realizable in this way.

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