Triad: a game of short love stories
Brian Hochhalter
IDT Masters Thesis Project, 2004

In Triad, players create short romance stories in the style of Japanese visual novels. Players take on the role of one of three characters in a high school love triangle.

Many games in this genre use a branching approach to making the story interactive. Players read the story to a certain point, gets a choice, choose from two or three options, then continue along a story branch that corresponds to their choice. This provides a limited amount of interactivity, but the cost of writing story branches limits the number of choices developers can offer players.

To address this issue, Triad investigates using an author simulating artificial intelligence to generate its story from a set of story fragments. Triad's story generator assembles the story on the fly according to the rules of its author simulation, allowing developers to concentrate effort on creating story fragments that can be assembled into an interesting story.

In its current version, Triad concentrates on romances in the Japanese popular romance genre. Because this genre follows well established formulas, such romances lend themselves to being created by artificial intelligence. The ai can be designed to follow the formulas that players expect to be used when writing a Japanese popular romance.

For future versions, the researcher plans to investigate other genres that could be drawn upon to create romance stories that appeal to a wider audience, with an eye toward creating different "story packs" including story tropes common to romances in different cultural contexts.

Specifics on the design rationale for Triad and information on lessons learned designing and implementing an ai-facilitated story game are available in this document.

Play!

The demonstration version of Triad is ready to download and play.

In this demo, players take on the role of Hiroshi (the boy with glasses) and competes with another boy to win the heart of Kimiko, Hiroshi's best friend since grade school.

The game is playable on any computer with Java installed. If you haven't got Java installed on your computer, you can get hold of it at Sun's Java site. Instructions for how to launch the game on your platform are included in the game's ReadMe file.

Click on the game's image window to run through the story. When Hiroshi has an opportunity to act, the "Action" menu above the text window will darken and you can select an action for Hiroshi to perform, then click on the image window to see the results. If the game appears to be stuck, click in the image window to move the story forward.