Almost Goodbye

Almost Goodbye is an experiment in minimalist procedural content generation for interactive narratives. It does not try to generate a whole story or plot points from scratch, but instead asks what is the minimum amount of procedural generation that can be added to a hand-authored story to produce something both computationally interesting but still narratively sound. The resulting narrative, about a scientist leaving Earth forever and saying her final goodbyes, generates “satellite” sentences that color the narrator’s description and perception of her conversations based on the choices made by the player in prior conversations and other player-influenced contextual cues.