Abstract
This paper presents a generative system for the automatic creation of video game levels. Our approach is novel in that it allows high-level design goals to be expressed in a top-down manner, while existing bottom-up techniques do not. We use the FI-2Pop genetic algorithm as a natural way to express both constraints and optimization goals for potential level designs. We develop a genetic encoding technique specific to level design, which proves to be extremely flexible. Example levels are generated for two different genres of game, demonstrating the system’s broad applicability.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Remo, C.: MIGS: Far Cry 2’s Guay on the importance of procedural content. Gamasutra (November 2008), http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21165
Meier, S.: Civilization. MicroProse (1991)
The NetHack DevTeam: Nethack (2009), http://www.nethack.org/
Kimbrough, S.O., Lu, M., Wood, D.H., Wu, D.J.: Exploring a two-market genetic algorithm. In: GECCO ’02: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pp. 415–422. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (2002)
Miyamoto, S., Yamauchi, H., Tezuka, T.: Super Mario Bros. Nintendo (1987)
Miyamoto, S., Nakago, T., Tezuka, T.: The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo (1986)
Sorenson, N., Pasquier, P.: The evolution of fun: Towards a challenge-based model of pleasure in video games. In: ICCC-X: First International Conference on Computational Creativity, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 258–267 (2010)
Togelius, J., Schmidhuber, J.: An experiment in automatic game design. In: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games, pp. 111–118 (2008)
Yannakakis, G., Hallam, J.: Towards capturing and enhancing entertainment in computer games. Advances in Artificial Intelligence, 432–442 (2006)
Smith, G., Treanor, M., Whitehead, J., Mateas, M.: Rhythm-based level generation for 2d platformers. In: FDG 2009: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 175–182. ACM, New York (2009)
Pedersen, C., Togelius, J., Yannakakis, G.: Modeling player experience in Super Mario Bros. In: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (September 2009)
Hemert, J.I.: Comparing classical methods for solving binary constraint satisfaction problems with state of the art evolutionary computation. In: Cagnoni, S., Gottlieb, J., Hart, E., Middendorf, M., Raidl, G.R. (eds.) EvoIASP 2002, EvoWorkshops 2002, EvoSTIM 2002, EvoCOP 2002, and EvoPlan 2002. LNCS, vol. 2279, pp. 82–91. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Coello Coello, C.A.: Theoretical and numerical constraint-handling techniques used with evolutionary algorithms: a survey of the state of the art. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering 191(11-12), 1245–1287 (2002)
Bushnell, N., Bristow, S., Wozniak, S.: Breakout. Atari (1976)
Harik, G.R.: Learning gene linkage to efficiently solve problems of bounded difficulty using genetic algorithms. PhD thesis, Ann Arbor, MI, USA (1997)
Sweetser, P., Wyeth, P.: Gameflow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games. Comput. Entertain. 3(3), 3 (2005)
Salen, K., Zimmerman, E.: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, October 2003. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Koster, R.: Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph Press, Scottsdale (2004)
Juul, J.: Fear of failing? the many meanings of difficulty in video games. In: Yao, X., Burke, E., Lozano, J.A., Smith, J., Merelo-Guerv, J.J., Bullinaria, J.A., Rowe, J., Tino, P., Kabn, A., Schwefel, H.P. (eds.) The Video Game Theory Reader, vol. 2, pp. 237–252. Routledge, New York (2009)
Humphreys, P.: Mathematical modeling in the social sciences. In: Turner, S.P., Roth, P.A. (eds.) The Blackwell guide to the philosophy of the social sciences, pp. 166–184. Wiley-Blackwell, New Jersey (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sorenson, N., Pasquier, P. (2010). Towards a Generic Framework for Automated Video Game Level Creation. In: Di Chio, C., et al. Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6024. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12239-2_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12239-2_14
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12238-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12239-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)