A PATTERN CATALOG FOR COMPUTER ROLE PLAYING GAMES

Abstract

The current state-of-the-art in computer games is to manually script individual game objects to provide desired interactions for each game adventure. Our research has shown that a small set of parameterized patterns (commonly occurring scenarios) characterize most of the interactions used in game adventures. They can be used to specify and even generate the necessary scripts. A game adventure can be created at a higher level of abstraction so that team communication and coding errors are reduced. The cost of creating a pattern can be amortized over all of the times the pattern is used, within a single adventure, across a series of game adventures and across games of the same genre. We use the computer role-playing game (CRPG) genre as an exemplar and present a pattern catalog that supports most scenarios that arise in this genre. This pattern catalog has been used to generate ALL of the scripts for three classes of objects (placeables, doors and triggers) in BioWare Corp.'s popular Neverwinter Nights CRPG campaign adventure.