Thesis

To explore the potential ability of games creating more dynamic, living worlds and stories, we took the existing Radiant Story and AI system created by Bethesda Softworks for Skyrim, which is capable of generating quests at run-time, and sought to understand what were its limitations or what caused it to not be enjoyed, in most parts, by the community and players. The basis for this project is the research and work done in the areas of procedural generation and interactive storytelling as a way to better dynamically create quests. As such, we had proposed to improve Skyrim's Radiant system by making this system create chained, that is, interconnected and sequential, events and quests, while attempting to maintain narrative coherence and characters' personalities consistent. The limitations of the base system however, did not allow for the complete development of the suggested structure, but still allowed the analysis of the potential of this type of work, and whether there is worth in continuing to follow it.

Learning a language can be very useful and fun, but also a lot of work. Portuguese, a language with grammatical gender, can be particularly challenging for learners whose native language lacks this feature. In this thesis, we took a look at the history of language education and existing language-learning platforms, which served to inform our own efforts, and developed Fishing for Words, a videogame for Android and Windows that helps players memorize the gender of words in Portuguese at the A2 level of proficiency, featuring two word-selection systems (which balance the game's difficulty in real-time according to the player's performance): The classic Leitner System and a novel Tag System. A full experimental procedure was developed and tested, with the purpose of validating its effectiveness, which revealed several pitfalls through which an experimenter evaluating such a game might fail to obtain results. In other words, we provide insight into how to get the participants to play the game and stick with it, which ours did not. Our main conclusions were that the game should be tested with more advanced students (who we suspect have more interest in grammatical gender), that the students should be given more time & more encouragement to play and that the game should be available on a wider range of platforms (around half of our participants could not play due to not having Android nor Windows).

The video game genre that is recognized as RTS had many stages of evolution since the beginning of it's creation. As the technology evolved, this type of game can nowadays be played in different types of devices. There is still few RTS games that can be played with more than one different device. This document presents the solution to design and create a RTS Game that is playable on both personal computers and mobile devices. The game conceived on this project uses HTML5 and JavaScript as programming languages and is playable in multiplayer mode. Multiple players compete between themselves in 1 versus 1 game matches. This game also contains the 4X elements present in the traditional RTS games ("eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate").

FAtiMA-Toolkit é uma coleção de ferramentas poderosa que tem o intuito de auxiliar na criação de personagens com capacidade de compreender comportamentos emocionais e sociais. A coleção permite a criação de personagens que atuam de uma maneira humana e credível. Apesar de poderoso, este toolkit tem limitações. Uma destas é o facto de não ser possível utilizar tecnologia de reconhecimento de voz. Com isto em mente, o objetivo deste projeto é o de criar um agente no FAtiMA-Toolkit que usa a Alexa da Amazon como reconhecedor de voz. Esta integração entre as duas ferramentas vai dar a opção de criar diálogos com reconhecimento de voz a futuros desenvolvedores do FAtiMA-Toolkit.