Mobile adaptive procedural content generation

The nature of most modern mobile games is different from that of most computer/console games, which are typically targeted at casual gamers and are played in a wide variety of space, time and device contexts. We argue that this feature of mobile games naturally fits with adaptive procedural content generation (PCG). In this paper, we propose the integration of two PCG-based approaches (experiencedriven and context-driven PCG) to support the generation of adaptive mobile game levels. We present and discuss the implementation of our approach in an existing game, 7’s Wild Ride. Gameplay semantics and player modeling are used to steer a level generator, featuring a time-dependent dynamic difficulty adjustment mechanism. From our two user studies, we conclude that (i) context-driven levels are preferable over traditional ones, and (ii) the game can adapt to different player types, keeping its gameplay balanced and player satisfaction.

@InProceedings { LHJB13b,
  author       = "Lopes, Ricardo and Hilf, Ken and Jayapalan, Luke and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Mobile adaptive procedural content generation",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of PCG 2013 - Workshop on Procedural Content Generation for Games, co-located with the Eighth
                  International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "may",
  year         = "2013",
  publisher    = "Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games",
  address      = "Chania, Crete, Greece",
  note         = "ISBN 78-0-9913982-1-8",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2013/LHJB13b"
}