Charbitat

Charbitat examines the relationship of virtual character and virtual world.

Creating complex procedural spaces for video games is a necessary and logical development that poses new questions to games research and design. The focus of the Charbitat project is on these new questions.

Our approach uses a character’s behavior and maps it onto procedurally generated game space. To accomplish and test this concept we are developing an experimental game prototype. As the player controls the main character of Charbitat, the game traces her behavior and translates those qualities into seed values for future space generation. Based on these seed values, more game space is generated as the player proceeds on her quest. Players generate a coherent game world as they explore and interact with it.

Space and character are directly mapped on each other.

In 2007 we mainly looked into questions of navigation and procedural camera control that reflect the space generation of the main project. You can find these spin off projects here: for the camera project (Oge Nnadi and Michael Boyce)

We gratefully acknowledge substantial funding from Turner Broadcasting and a LEAP fund from Georgia Tech. Charbitat is connected to GVU and the Experimental Games Lab.