Mixed-initiative design of game levels: integrating mission and space into level generation

A level designer typically creates the levels of a game to cater for a certain set of objectives, or mission. But in procedural content generation, it is common to treat the creation of missions and the generation of levels as two separate concerns. This often leads to generic levels that allow for various missions. However, this also creates a generic impression for the player, because the potential for synergy between the objectives and the level is not utilised. Follow- ing up on the mission-space generation concept, as described by Dormans [5], we explore the possibilities of procedurally generating a level from a designer-made mission. We use a generative grammar to transform a mission into a level in a mixed-initiative design setting. We provide two case studies, dungeon levels for a rogue-like game, and platformer levels for a metroidvania game. The generators dier in the way they use the mission to generate the space, but are created with the same tool for content generation based on model transformations. We discuss the dierences between the two generation processes and compare it with a parameterized approach.

@InProceedings { KBB15,
  author       = "Karavolos, Daniel and Bouwer, Anders and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Mixed-initiative design of game levels: integrating mission and space into level generation",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of FDG 2015 - Tenth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "jun",
  year         = "2015",
  keywords     = "Game Design, Procedural Content Generation, Generative Grammars, Automated Game Design, Mixed-Initiative De- sign, Level Generation",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2015/KBB15"
}