English
Related papers

Related papers: Finding Game Levels with the Right Difficulty in a…

200 papers

Recent advancements in procedural content generation via machine learning enable the generation of video-game levels that are aesthetically similar to human-authored examples. However, the generated levels are often unplayable without…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Hejia Zhang , Matthew C. Fontaine , Amy K. Hoover , Julian Togelius , Bistra Dilkina , Stefanos Nikolaidis

In this paper, we present a new methodology that employs tester agents to automate video game testing. We introduce two types of agents -synthetic and human-like- and two distinct approaches to create them. Our agents are derived from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Sinan Ariyurek , Aysu Betin-Can , Elif Surer

Procedurally generated video game content has the potential to drastically reduce the content creation budget of game developers and large studios. However, adoption is hindered by limitations such as slow generation, as well as low quality…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Michael Beukman , Christopher W Cleghorn , Steven James

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a machine learning approach capable of generating novel example outputs across a space of provided training examples. Procedural Content Generation (PCG) of levels for video games could benefit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Vanessa Volz , Jacob Schrum , Jialin Liu , Simon M. Lucas , Adam Smith , Sebastian Risi

This paper presents a novel approach to automated playtesting for the prediction of human player behavior and experience. It has previously been demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) game-playing agents can predict both game…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Shaghayegh Roohi , Christian Guckelsberger , Asko Relas , Henri Heiskanen , Jari Takatalo , Perttu Hämäläinen

The term Procedural Content Generation (PCG) refers to the (semi-)automatic generation of game content by algorithmic means, and its methods are becoming increasingly popular in game-oriented research and industry. A special class of these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Vanessa Volz , Boris Naujoks , Pascal Kerschke , Tea Tusar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Florian Rupp , Manuel Eberhardinger , Kai Eckert

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is a technique to generate complex and diverse environments in an automated way. However, while generating content with PCG methods is often straightforward, generating meaningful content that reflects…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Shyam Sudhakaran , Miguel González-Duque , Claire Glanois , Matthias Freiberger , Elias Najarro , Sebastian Risi

This paper introduces an information-theoretic method for selecting a subset of problems which gives the most information about a group of problem-solving algorithms. This method was tested on the games in the General Video Game AI (GVGAI)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Matthew Stephenson , Damien Anderson , Ahmed Khalifa , John Levine , Jochen Renz , Julian Togelius , Christoph Salge

Procedural content generation uses algorithmic techniques to create large amounts of new content for games at much lower production costs. In newer approaches, procedural content generation utilizes machine learning. However, these methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Davor Hafnar , Jure Demšar

The accurate and personalized estimation of task difficulty provides many opportunities for optimizing user experience. However, user diversity makes such difficulty estimation hard, in that empirical measurements from some user sample do…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Jeppe Theiss Kristensen , Christian Guckelsberger , Paolo Burelli , Perttu Hämäläinen

Procedural content generation (PCG) has become an increasingly popular technique in game development, allowing developers to generate dynamic, replayable, and scalable environments with reduced manual effort. In this study, a novel method…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Miraç Buğra Özkan

Machine learning has been a popular tool in many different fields, including procedural content generation. However, procedural content generation via machine learning (PCGML) approaches can struggle with controllability and coherence. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Kynan Sorochan , Jerry Chen , Yakun Yu , Matthew Guzdial

Achieving optimal balance in games is essential to their success, yet reliant on extensive manual work and playtesting. To facilitate this process, the Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL) framework has recently…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Florian Rupp , Alessandro Puddu , Christian Becker-Asano , Kai Eckert

Designing agents that are able to achieve different play-styles while maintaining a competitive level of play is a difficult task, especially for games for which the research community has not found super-human performance yet, like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Diego Perez-Liebana , Cristina Guerrero-Romero , Alexander Dockhorn , Linjie Xu , Jorge Hurtado , Dominik Jeurissen

This paper explores adaptive problem solving with a game designed to support the development of problem-solving skills. Using an adaptive, AI-powered puzzle game, our adaptive problem-solving system dynamically generates pathfinding-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Matthew McConnell , Richard Zhao

Balancing games, especially those with asymmetric multiplayer content, requires significant manual effort and extensive human playtesting during development. For this reason, this work focuses on generating balanced levels tailored to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Florian Rupp , Kai Eckert

Generative models for level generation have shown great potential in game production. However, they often provide limited control over the generation, and the validity of the generated levels is unreliable. Despite this fact, only a few…

We propose a simple, general and effective technique, Reward Randomization for discovering diverse strategic policies in complex multi-agent games. Combining reward randomization and policy gradient, we derive a new algorithm,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Zhenggang Tang , Chao Yu , Boyuan Chen , Huazhe Xu , Xiaolong Wang , Fei Fang , Simon Du , Yu Wang , Yi Wu

Procedural content generation (PCG) is a growing field, with numerous applications in the video game industry and great potential to help create better games at a fraction of the cost of manual creation. However, much of the work in PCG is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Michael Beukman , Manuel Fokam , Marcel Kruger , Guy Axelrod , Muhammad Nasir , Branden Ingram , Benjamin Rosman , Steven James