Related papers: Demonstrating the Feasibility of Automatic Game Ba…
Automated game balancing has often focused on single-agent scenarios. In this paper we present a tool for balancing multi-player games during game design. Our approach requires a designer to construct an intuitive graphical representation…
As the complexity and scope of games increase, game testing, also called playtesting, becomes an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of game testing leaves space for automation. In this…
Balancing is, especially among players, a highly debated topic of video games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, player satisfaction, churn rates and success. Yet, conceptions about the definition of…
The balancing process for game levels in competitive two-player contexts involves a lot of manual work and testing, particularly for non-symmetrical game levels. In this work, we frame game balancing as a procedural content generation task…
Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…
Game balancing is a longstanding challenge requiring repeated playtesting, expert intuition, and extensive manual tuning. We introduce RuleSmith, the first framework that achieves automated game balancing by leveraging the reasoning…
Game designers use human playtesting to gather feedback about game design elements when iteratively improving a game. Playtesting, however, is expensive: human testers must be recruited, playtest results must be aggregated and interpreted,…
The dependency graph is a data architecture that models all the dependencies between the different types of assets in the game. It depicts the dependency-based relationships between the assets of a game. For example, a player must construct…
The Nash equilibrium is an important benchmark for behaviour in systems of strategic autonomous agents. Polymatrix games are a succinct and expressive representation of multiplayer games that model pairwise interactions between players. The…
Game economy design significantly shapes the player experience and progression speed. Modern game economies are becoming increasingly complex and can be very sensitive to even minor numerical adjustments, which may have an unexpected impact…
We consider multi-player games played on graphs, in which the players aim at fulfilling their own (not necessarily antagonistic) objectives. In the spirit of evolutionary game theory, we suppose that the players have the right to repeatedly…
We present a new concept called Game Mechanic Alignment theory as a way to organize game mechanics through the lens of systemic rewards and agential motivations. By disentangling player and systemic influences, mechanics may be better…
Balancing an ever growing strategic game of high complexity, such as Hearthstone is a complex task. The target of making strategies diverse and customizable results in a delicate intricate system. Tuning over 2000 cards to generate the…
A recent body of experimental literature has studied empirical game-theoretical analysis, in which we have partial knowledge of a game, consisting of observations of a subset of the pure-strategy profiles and their associated payoffs to…
In this work, we consider the problem of autonomous racing with multiple agents where agents must interact closely and influence each other to compete. We model interactions among agents through a game-theoretical framework and propose an…
A classic model to study strategic decision making in multi-agent systems is the normal-form game. This model can be generalised to allow for an infinite number of pure strategies leading to continuous games. Multi-objective normal-form…
Game-theoretic techniques and equilibria analysis facilitate the design and verification of competitive systems. While algorithmic complexity of equilibria computation has been extensively studied, practical implementation and application…
Nonzero-sum stochastic differential games with impulse controls offer a realistic and far-reaching modelling framework for applications within finance, energy markets, and other areas, but the difficulty in solving such problems has…
Creating and evaluating games manually is an arduous and laborious task. Procedural content generation can aid by creating game artifacts, but usually not an entire game. Evolutionary game design, which combines evolutionary algorithms with…
We conducted a laboratory experiment involving human subjects to test the theoretical hypothesis that equilibrium selection can be impacted by manipulating the games dynamics process, by using modern control theory. Our findings indicate…