Related papers: Taking the Scenic Route: Automatic Exploration for…

To enable automated software testing, the ability to automatically navigate to a state of interest and to explore all, or at least sufficient number of, instances of such a state is fundamental. When testing a computer game the problem has…

The process of playtesting a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a playtesting approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers.…

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…

As modern games continue growing both in size and complexity, it has become more challenging to ensure that all the relevant content is tested and that any potential issue is properly identified and fixed. Attempting to maximize testing…

Roguelike games generally feature exploration problems as a critical, yet often repetitive element of gameplay. Automated approaches, however, face challenges in terms of optimality, as well as due to incomplete information, such as from…

Recent real-time heuristic search algorithms have demonstrated outstanding performance in video-game pathfinding. However, their applications have been thus far limited to that domain. We proceed with the aim of facilitating wider…

Game-based interactive driving simulations have emerged as versatile platforms for advancing decision-making algorithms in road transport mobility. While these environments offer safe, scalable, and engaging settings for testing driving…

Games are often designed to shape player behavior in a desired way; however, it can be unclear how design decisions affect the space of behaviors in a game. Designers usually explore this space through human playtesting, which can be…

Many natural processes rely on optimizing the success ratio of a search process. We use an experimental setup consisting of a simple online game in which players have to find a target hidden on a board, to investigate the how the rounds are…

Game maps are useful for human players, general-game-playing agents, and data-driven procedural content generation. These maps are generally made by hand-assembling manually-created screenshots of game levels. Besides being tedious and…

The game industry is challenged to cope with increasing growth in demand and game complexity while maintaining acceptable quality standards for released games. Classic approaches solely depending on human efforts for quality assurance and…

Automated game design is the problem of automatically producing games through computational processes. Traditionally, these methods have relied on the authoring of search spaces by a designer, defining the space of all possible games for…

Graph Exploration problems ask a searcher to explore an unknown environment. The environment is modeled as a graph, where the searcher needs to visit each vertex beginning at some vertex. Treasure Hunt problems are a variation of Graph…

We present a new method of automatic critical mechanic discovery for video games using a combination of game description parsing and playtrace information. This method is applied to several games within the General Video Game Artificial…

We investigate the increasingly important and common game-solving setting where we do not have an explicit description of the game but only oracle access to it through gameplay, such as in financial or military simulations and computer…

Matching tile games are an extremely popular game genre. Arguably the most popular iteration, Match-3 games, are simple to understand puzzle games, making them great benchmarks for research. In this paper, we propose developing different…

This work presents an exploration and imitation-learning-based agent capable of state-of-the-art performance in playing text-based computer games. Text-based computer games describe their world to the player through natural language and…

Creative exploration is central to science, art and cognitive development. However, research on creative exploration is limited by a lack of high-resolution automated paradigms. To address this, we present such an automated paradigm, the…

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,…

Exploration is a key part of many video games. We investigate the using an exploratory agent to provide feedback on the design of procedurally generated game levels, 5 engaging levels and 5 unengaging levels. We expand upon a framework…