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Honours Project

Year-long project for my final year dissertation at university, with the aim to answer the research question: Can an environmental procedural generation system in a driving game be affected effectively by a player modelling system at real-time to produce more personalised and enjoyable game experiences for players?

2018
Unreal Engine 4
PC
Solo Project

Project Background

For the last year of university, we were required to conduct a research project over the course of the year. With an interest in level design, procedural generation and really wanting to make a roadtrip game, I took on the ambitious task of producing a simple driving game with procedurally generated environments. In terms of research, I was interested to work out if a system could be produced to adapt procedurally generated environments to player preferences that an integrated system could identify. 

Over the course of the project, I conducted research to identify various approaches to procedural generation and how adaptation and personalisation could be used to create better game experiences for players. Afterwards, with a lot of trial and error, I produced a simple on-the-rails endless driving game in Unreal Engine 4. Through the use of UE4's Blueprints, I was able to produce a straightforward road and environment generator which would populate the sides of the road with environment objects based on 1 of 6 predefined environmental zones. The player would then drive down roads and be presented with new roads and environments and be given the option to accept or decline the new road. As the player continues to drive, making decisions along the way, a preference system would progressively identify and score the environmental zones based on the player's decisions and duration. Based on the scoring, the system would then increase the likeliness of the main predicted preferred zone.

A summarised version of the research, project and results can be found in the poster below.

Research Poster

The poster below was produced for a presentation and assessment following the submission of the dissertation. The poster covers the five main stages of the project, alongside the main research and findings:

Lyall Campbell Honours Project

Gameplay Video

Below is a video of a session of the game, where players / participants were expected to drive for around 12 minutes and made decisions on what roads to travel down. At the end of the video, the recorded variables and events are presented in a large (and messy) output screen.

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