Abstract
When a puzzle game is created, its design parameters must be chosen to allow solvable and interesting challenges to be created for the player. We investigate the use of random sampling as a computationally inexpensive means of automated game analysis, to evaluate the BoxOff family of puzzle games. This analysis reveals useful insights into the game, such as the surprising fact that almost 100 % of randomly generated challenges have a solution, but less than 10 % will be solved using strictly random play, validating the inventor’s design choices. We show the 1D game to be trivial and the 3D game to be viable.
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Notes
- 1.
The name “BoxOff” was coined by the first author.
- 2.
Personal correspondence.
- 3.
The 1D version of the game might be called “LineOff”.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship, as part of the project Games Without Frontiers.
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Browne, C., Maire, F. (2015). Monte Carlo Analysis of a Puzzle Game. In: Pfahringer, B., Renz, J. (eds) AI 2015: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. AI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9457. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26350-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26350-2_8
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