RPG Design: Computer RPG Pattern Catalog
Ah, ya gotta love it when academia and computer games mix!

Here's a paper from 2005 where college students from the University of Alberta presented a catalog of higher-level CRPG "patterns" that could be used to replace the tedious, error-prone process of manual scripting. According to the abstract for their paper:

"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."

I haven't delved too deeply into it yet. But the point is to add a higher level of abstraction to the scripting process - which would, in turn, make the process of creating content much easier. Granted, it works across a limited universe to accomplish things in a fairly "Neverwinter Nights"-centric way. They do mention similar patterns in Morrowind and Fable. But I think CRPG developers would do well to take note and at least browse the paper and the list of patterns.

I've been thinking about making similar abstractions in Frayed Knights to make it easier to create (and maintain) the quests and events, and this has helped solidify some of my thoughts.

Computer RPG Pattern Catalog

A Pattern Catalog for Computer Role Playing Games (paper explaining the catalog - PDF format)

On a side note, isn't it awesome that we live in an era where you can find academic papes on this kind of thing?

Labels: Game Design, programming, Roleplaying Games

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