research-article

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

Authors:

M. KatchabawAuthors Info & Claims

Future Play '07: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Future Play

Pages 152 - 159

https://doi.org/10.1145/1328202.1328229

Published: 14 November 2007 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

Thawonmas RFukumoto A(2011)Frame Extraction Based on Displacement Amount for Automatic Comic Generation from Metaverse Museum Visit LogIntelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services10.1007/978-3-642-22158-3_16(153-162)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22158-3_16

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cover image ACM Other conferences

Future Play '07: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Future Play

November 2007

279 pages

ISBN:9781595939432

DOI:10.1145/1328202

Conference Chairs:
Bill Kapralos
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
,
Mike Katchabaw
University of Western Ontario
,
Jay Rajnovich
Algoma U

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Province of Ontario, Ministry of Economic Development and Trade
Arcademy Games Awards Festival Arcadia
Microsoft User Research Group
Government of Canada, FedNor
Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre
Garage Games
Visualization Design Institute, Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Algoma University College
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Bug-Tracker.Com
SchoolFinder

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SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 November 2007

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Futureplay2007: Futureplay 2007

November 14 - 17, 2007

Toronto, Canada

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Cited By

Thawonmas RFukumoto A(2011)Frame Extraction Based on Displacement Amount for Automatic Comic Generation from Metaverse Museum Visit LogIntelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services10.1007/978-3-642-22158-3_16(153-162)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22158-3_16

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