Related papers: Playtesting: What is Beyond Personas
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,…
This paper describes a method for generative player modeling and its application to the automatic testing of game content using archetypal player models called procedural personas. Theoretically grounded in psychological decision theory,…
Using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically test a game remains a critical challenge for the development of richer and more complex game worlds and for the advancement of AI at large. One of the most promising methods for achieving…
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.…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
We explore the use of Artificial Potential Fields (APFs) to solve Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) and Lifelong MAPF (LMAPF) problems. In MAPF, a team of agents must move to their goal locations without collisions, whereas in LMAPF, new…
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…
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…
For over a decade now, robotics and the use of artificial agents have become a common thing.Testing the performance of new path finding or search space optimization algorithms has also become a challenge as they require simulation or an…
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…
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…
Self-play is an unsupervised training procedure which enables the reinforcement learning agents to explore the environment without requiring any external rewards. We augment the self-play setting by providing an external memory where the…
Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity…
A playtest is the process in which human testers are recruited to play video games and to reveal software bugs. Manual testing is expensive and time-consuming, especially when there are many mobile games to test and every software version…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) in games has gained significant momentum in recent years, enabling the creation of different agent behaviors that can transform a player's gaming experience. However, deploying RL agents in production…
The automation of functional testing in software has allowed developers to continuously check for negative impacts on functionality throughout the iterative phases of development. This is not the case for User eXperience (UX), which has…
Different from what happens for most types of software systems, testing video games has largely remained a manual activity performed by human testers. This is mostly due to the continuous and intelligent user interaction video games…