Related papers: Automatic Playtesting for Game Parameter Tuning vi…

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…

Playtesting is an essential step in the game design process. Game designers use the feedback from playtests to refine their designs. Game designers may employ procedural personas to automate the playtesting process. In this paper, we…

In games, as in and many other domains, design validation and testing is a huge challenge as systems are growing in size and manual testing is becoming infeasible. This paper proposes a new approach to automated game validation and testing.…

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.…

Games are usually created incrementally, requiring repeated testing of the same scenarios, which is a tedious and error-prone task for game developers. Therefore, we aim to alleviate this game testing process by encapsulating it into a game…

In this paper, we propose a method and workflow for automating regression testing of certain video game aspects using automated planning and incremental action model learning techniques. The basic idea is to use detailed game logs and…

Video-game projects are notorious for having day-one bugs, no matter how big their budget or team size. The quality of a game is essential for its success. This quality could be assessed and ensured through testing. However, to the best of…

As the complexity and scope of game development increase, playtesting remains an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of playtesting gives space to improvements in the process. In this…

We argue for the use of active learning methods for player modelling. In active learning, the learning algorithm chooses where to sample the search space so as to optimise learning progress. We hypothesise that player modelling based on…

The increasing complexity of gameplay mechanisms in modern video games is leading to the emergence of a wider range of ways to play games. The variety of possible play-styles needs to be anticipated by designers, through automated tests.…

Most games have, or can be generalised to have, a number of parameters that may be varied in order to provide instances of games that lead to very different player experiences. The space of possible parameter settings can be seen as a…

AI-controlled characters in fighting games are expected to possess reasonably high skills and behave in a believable, human-like manner, exhibiting a diversity of play styles and strategies. Thus, the development of fighting game AI…

While general game playing is an active field of research, the learning of game design has tended to be either a secondary goal of such research or it has been solely the domain of humans. We propose a field of research, Automated Game…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

We investigate systematically the impact of human intervention in the training of computer players in a strategy board game. In that game, computer players utilise reinforcement learning with neural networks for evolving their playing…

Recently, there have been several high-profile achievements of agents learning to play games against humans and beat them. In this paper, we study the problem of training intelligent agents in service of game development. Unlike the agents…

Balancing game difficulty in video games is a key task to create interesting gaming experiences for players. Mismatching the game difficulty and a player's skill or commitment results in frustration or boredom on the player's side, and…

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…

Autonomous game design, generating games algorithmically, has been a longtime goal within the technical games research field. However, existing autonomous game design systems have relied in large part on human-authoring for game design…

The complexity of computer games is ever increasing. In this setup, guiding an automated test algorithm to find a solution to solve a testing task in a game's huge interaction space is very challenging. Having a model of a system to…