Related papers: On Video Game Balancing: Joining Player- and Data-…
Recently, the market size of online game has been increasing astonishingly fast, and so does the importance of good game design. In online games, usually a human user competes with others, so the fairness of the game system to all users is…
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…
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…
Automated game balancing has often focused on single-agent scenarios. In this paper we present a tool for balancing multi-player games during game design. Our approach requires a designer to construct an intuitive graphical representation…
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 construct several definitions of imbalance and playability, both of which are related to the existence of dominated strategies. Specifically, a maximally balanced game and a playable game cannot have dominated strategies for any player.…
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…
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…
The dependency graph is a data architecture that models all the dependencies between the different types of assets in the game. It depicts the dependency-based relationships between the assets of a game. For example, a player must construct…
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…
Video game designers often view confusion as undesirable, yet it is inevitable, as new players must adapt to new interfaces and mechanics in an increasingly varied and innovative game market, which is more popular than ever. Research…
Character diversity in competitive games, while enriching gameplay, often introduces balance challenges that can negatively impact player experience and strategic depth. Traditional balance assessments rely on aggregate metrics like win…
How can balance be quantified in game settings? This question is crucial for game designers, especially in player-versus-player (PvP) games, where analyzing the strength relations among predefined team compositions-such as hero combinations…
In video games, players' perception of the game world and related information depends on their or the game designer's choice of a virtual camera model. In this paper, we attempt to answer the research question of whether it is possible to…
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…
Online competitive games have become a mainstream entertainment platform. To create a fair and exciting experience, these games use rating systems to match players with similar skills. While there has been an increasing amount of research…
To what extent does the structure of the players' strategy space influence the efficiency of decentralized solutions in congestion games? In this work, we investigate whether better performance are possible when restricting to load…
This work introduces a unified framework for analyzing games in greater depth. In the existing literature, players' strategies are typically assigned scalar values, and equilibrium concepts are used to identify compatible choices. However,…
Collaboration is an integral part of human dialogue. Typical task-oriented dialogue games assign asymmetric roles to the participants, which limits their ability to elicit naturalistic role-taking in collaboration and its negotiation. We…
Game economy design significantly shapes the player experience and progression speed. Modern game economies are becoming increasingly complex and can be very sensitive to even minor numerical adjustments, which may have an unexpected impact…