The Death of the Level Designer: Procedural Content Generation in Games - Part Four

(You'll want to read parts one, two and three first)

It's January 2013. The Christmas games embargo that the Clinton administration put in place to ensure you saw friends and family over the holiday season has been lifted, and you excitedly unwrap the plastic from your lastest purchase: Dream Park 2.0. You've already heard about the great mods created by international players working on behalf of Gamers Now United (Stallman's reorganisation of the former Open Source movement once he finally succumbed to playing World of Warcraft), and you download a pre-recommended pack from your Facebook game reputation system.

The game fires up, and you click through the menus making a few choices and letting the RNG choose the rest. Medieval. Clockpunk instead of magic. Moderate size continent. You see a few of the random choices flash in front of you: the game has generated four civilisations, distinguished by Ionic, Doric, Corithinian and Tuscan architecture, and the first mod kicks in. FastGen reduces the elabourate character generation options down to the choice of three key phrases: you choose Rugged, Handsome and Prankster on a whim, and end up with a boyishly good looking peasant standing at the edge of a mud-hovelled village amidst a crowd of on-lookers.

The king of the Ionic civilisaton (Hrepathous) is visiting the local barony and come down to the village to demonstrate his gift of healing and attend to the villagers' ailments. As you grow bored of the Baron's speeches and begin to look elsewhere, your lover whispers 'the pigsty' in your ear and with a shy smile slips out of your grasp and towards the romantic rendevous. You follow at a short distance, but come up abruptly against the squat figure of her father.

'Where are you going?' he asks threatening. You stammer something and are forced to divert your course to around the back of the building the king sits in.

In the shadows, stand two assassins, in Doric dress, cradling weapons you have never seen before. They've cut a hole in the adobe and are preparing to slip through.

One sees you, and raises his weapon. Just then your lover runs out, between you and your attacker. She is cut down in a hail of projectiles, and your heart beats and time seems to slow.

Do you run or fight? Your decision is made for you, as the screams of the villagers signal that more armed men have appeared in the fields around you. You run.

The hectic pursuit, between huts and over fences, watching your fellow villagers gunned down and slaughtered, comes to a climax. Trapped in a dead end, amidst the rutting pigs where you had intended an altogether different purpose, you are caught by your pursuers. One, cruel looking and with a milky blindness in one eye, and a clockwork hand, steps forward. He raises his mechanical arm and laughs at you. It is the last thing you see.

The You Only Live Once mod kicks in, working in conjunction with the AI plot director. Instead of restarting from an earlier checkpoint, you awaken again, this time as a Corinthian merchant in a larger town. Rumours of war between the civilisations are spreading...

(You'll want to read part five next).