Augmenting Technology Trees: Automation and Tool Support

In this work we tackle the rigidity of predefined technology trees common in many digital games. Technology trees have been a well-understood concept in the industry for approximately two decades. Unfortunately, so far they have mainly been considered as fixed structures. Some attempts of adding ostensible temporal variability to them have been made before by the means of simulating the effect. Our approach, on the other hand, aims to create a stepping stone towards true runtime technology generation for (both serious and leisure) games in order to improve them. We present potentially useful ideas, constructs, and methods to achieve this goal. Initial observations on our test implementation are also presented.