Part 4: Quests

I'm writing this blog post as I create the initial code.  This is Part 4 of a series of posts on procedural generation in games.

I've been thinking about quests in Idamu Caverns for quite some time.  Now that it's time to start implementing the code for the next feature release, I've been thinking about them a lot more.  Quests form an integral part of many game genres, and previously I'd thought it would be poor form to have them generated programatically.

However, the last few days, as I plan out my actual strategy for the code, I'm realizing that quests aren't that different from a lot of other game aspects that can be generated.  For one thing, most quests fall into one of a few categories with aspects that are easily randomized.  At it's core, a quest contains the following elements:

1. Someone/something to communicate with about the quest
2. A thing to do for the quest
3. A reward for the quest

Number 3 is the easiest to generate: pick a valuable item that the player doesn't have and offer it as a reward, possibly in addition to points added to the score, or an achievement if the game supports that mechanic.

Number 2 is only slightly more complex.  Wikipedia has a list that breaks quests down into categories, which basically handles everything I need to say about this.

Number one is where things get interesting.  On the surface it seems simple, spawn an NPC and put it somewhere the player will find, then use that NPC to manage the issuing and rewarding of the quest.  If it were that easy, though, you could just have a book of quests that the player can read from any time she wants.  One of the important reasons for creating an NPC to begin with is to create some sense of realism to the game.  Sure, I could simply place a Creature that says "Bring me $number $items and I will reward you with $treasure." and having a simple generator like that would be better than no quest at all, but it lacks the emotional power that many gamers crave.  Many gamers want the game to give them an emotional reward in combination with an in-game reward.  Something like, "thanks to you, my wife's spirit can finally rest in peace."  I don't know if I can generate that sort of thing with code.

From a programming perspective, all quest code has a fixed way in which it needs to interact with the rest of the game code:

1. There needs to be a way to communicate the desired difficulty to the quest generator
2. The quest generator needs to ensure that all the game objects required for the quest are populated
3. The NPC has to communicate the quest to the player
4. The NPC has to recognize when the quest is complete and reward the player
5. If it's possible to fail the quest, the NPC has to recognize and react to that as well

There are other things that could be added.  For example, the player's reputation with the NPC might determine how good the reward is, or whether the quest is available at all.  There are also non-critical nuances, such as what happens when the player has received the quest but has not yet completed it, then talks to the NPC again.  In the end, however, the above five are pretty much the minimum for getting a quest engine running.

For the first round of quests in Idamu Caverns, I've decided to create a quest manager that can select from multiple types of quest generators when the time comes to make a quest.  That will allow me to gradually implement different quest types and have the quest manager be a central place to enable them when they're ready.

The early quests will be fairly generic in nature, and thus not have much emotional value to the player.  However, once the code is in place, it will allow me to easily write specific quests and interleave them with the generated ones, the overall goal being to quickly provide a wide array of shallow quests to make the game feel broad, then add quests with depth over time, to strengthen the game.

If you join the Idamu Caverns community on Google+, you'll see updates as they happen and will know when this new code is released.  If you're enjoying reading about the development of Idamu Caverns, or enjoying the game itself, please consider becoming a Patron to ensure I can continue developing it.

The next post in this series discusses dynamic plots.