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Difficulty is one of the key drivers of player engagement and it is often one of the aspects that designers tweak most to optimise the player experience; operationalising it is, therefore, a crucial task for game development studios. A…
Automated game design is a rapidly growing area of research, yet many aspects of game design lie largely unexamined still, as most systems focus on two-dimensional games with clear objectives and goal-oriented gameplay. This paper describes…
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…
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…
One of the main difficulties remains the collaboration between the various experts involved in designing the Learning Games (LG). Our literature review focuses on the pitfalls and principles that have been identified by various authors in…
Game development is a highly technical practice that traditionally requires programming skills. This serves as a barrier to entry for would-be developers or those hoping to use games as part of their creative expression. While there have…
The human ability to learn rules and solve problems has been a central concern of cognitive science research since the field's earliest days. But we do not just follow rules and solve problems given to us by others: we modify those rules,…
With the advent of mobile games and the according growing and competitive market, game user research can provide valuable insights and a competitive edge if methods and procedures are employed that match the distinct challenges that mobile…
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.…
Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) show great potential for increasing engagement, creativity and authentic learning. Yet, despite their great potential for education, the use of MLGs by teachers, remains limited. This is partly due to the fact…
People enjoy encounters with generative software, but rarely are they encouraged to interact with, understand or engage with it. In this paper we define the term 'PCG-based game', and explain how this concept follows on from the idea of an…
[Background] The game industry faces fierce competition and games are developed on short deadlines and tight budgets. Continuously testing and experimenting with new ideas and features is essential in validating and guiding development…
Data is becoming an important central point for making design decisions for most software. Game development is not an exception. As data-driven methods and systems start to populate these environments, a good question is: can we make models…
We introduce GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the…
Game development is a highly specialized task that relies on a complex game engine powered by complex programming languages, preventing many gaming enthusiasts from handling it. This paper introduces the Chat Game Engine (ChatGE) powered by…
We describe nearly fifteen years of General Game Playing experimental research history in the context of reproducibility and fairness of comparisons between various GGP agents and systems designed to play games described by different…
The games research community has developed substantial knowledge on designing engaging experiences that draw players in. Surprisingly, less is known about player \textit{dis}engagement, with existing work predominantly addressing…
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.…
Game agents such as opponents, non-player characters, and teammates are central to player experiences in many modern games. As the landscape of AI techniques used in the games industry evolves to adopt machine learning (ML) more widely, it…
Experimentation is a cornerstone of successful game development and live operations, enabling teams to optimize player engagement, retention, and monetization. This article provides a comprehensive guide to implementing experimentation in…