Story scripting for automating cinematics and cut-scenes in video games

  • Authors:

  • W. Zhang;M. McLaughlin;M. Katchabaw

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada;The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada;The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Future Play '07 Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Future Play
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Storytelling can play a very important role in the success of modern video games. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult for writers to directly create and integrate story content into games on their own, and they must instead rely upon programmers and others on the development team to implement their stories. This needlessly complicates the game development process, leading to increased costs, more strain on developer time, and loss of creative control and, potentially, story quality as a result. Consequently, tools and supports are necessary to enable writers to generate story content for games directly, with minimal programming or programmer assistance required, if any. This paper examines the use of specialized story scripting elements to automate the production of cinematics and cut-scenes for video games. These elements allow writers to specify their stories in a well-defined, structured format that can be acted out automatically by software. This paper discusses these story scripting elements in depth, along with a prototype software engine capable of using these elements for cinematic and cut-scene automation. This paper also presents experiences with using this engine to recreate cinematics and cut-scenes from existing commercial video games.