Procedural generation of populations for storytelling

Procedural world generation is often limited to creating worlds devoid of people and any background. Because of this, cre- ating a vibrant, living world is still a problem that requires a skilled designer. In this paper, we present a method that generates a socially connected population in any virtual ter- rain, using a mixed-initiative simulation of settlements that adapt to the world and to a designer's input. Using this sim- ulation, we develop a number of sample worlds that convey the expressive potential of the approach. We further eval- uate ease of use with a user study. As a proof-of-concept, we implement the system to bridge the output of a terrain generation tool to the input of a narrative generation tool.

@InProceedings { IKBC15,
  author       = "Veld, Bas in het and Kybartas, Ben and Bidarra, Rafael and Meyer, John-Jules Ch.",
  title        = "Procedural generation of populations for storytelling",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of PCG 2015 - Workshop on Procedural Content Generation for Games, co-located with the Tenth
                  International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "jun",
  year         = "2015",
  keywords     = "computational storytelling, population generation, procedu- ral content generation",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2015/IKBC15"
}