The Best Laid Plans

The Best Laid Plans is an interactive narrative adventure game that uses artificial intelligence techniques to generate the story automatically from scratch as you play. You take on the roll of a hapless goblin minion of The Dark Overlord, who has sent you on a mission to fetch a bottle of hair tonic. This game tells the story of how that mission goes terribly wrong!

Every time you make a new plan, the game uses intelligent narrative planning techniques to find some way to thwart it. The story planner reasons about narrative concepts like character intentionality and conflict to ensure that the story makes sense and all the characters act believably. The planner comes up with thousands of stories each second and chooses one based on quality metrics.

The Best Laid Plans is a research prototype and proof-of-concept that demonstrates how narrative planning can be used for procedural content generation of stories. While the game may not be a blockbuster, we hope it demonstrates the potential of narrative planning and AI storytelling techniques.

Download

The most recent stable version can be downloaded here:

The Best Laid Plans, version 0.97

Requirements:

  • Windows XP or higher
  • At least 3 gigabytes of RAM (4 recommended)
  • Java 7 or higher must be installed.
  • Java must be on your system path.

Team

  • Project Lead and AI Programming: Stephen G. Ware
  • Executive Director: R. Michael Young
  • Programming and Interface: Christian Stith
  • Programming and Environment: Phillip Wright
  • Concept Art: Mark Biondolillo
  • Coloring: Allison R. Oliphant
  • Special Thanks: Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

Publications