Related papers: Mortar: Evolving Mechanics for Automatic Game Desi…

Game designs often center on the game mechanics---rules governing the logical evolution of the game. We seek to develop an intelligent system that generates computer games. As first steps towards this goal we present a composable and…

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…

We develop methods to formally describe and compare games, in order to probe questions of game structure and design, and as a stepping stone to predicting player behavior from design patterns. We define a grammar-like formalism to describe…

We want to introduce another smoothing approach by treating each geometric element as a player in a game: a quest for the best element quality. In other words, each player has the goal of becoming as regular as possible. The set of…

Many games are reliant on creating new and engaging content constantly to maintain the interest of their player-base. One such example are puzzle games, in such it is common to have a recurrent need to create new puzzles. Creating new…

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…

Attribute-driven software architecture design aims to provide decision support by taking into account the quality attributes of softwares. A central question in this process is: What architecture design best fulfills the desirable software…

Creating and evaluating games manually is an arduous and laborious task. Procedural content generation can aid by creating game artifacts, but usually not an entire game. Evolutionary game design, which combines evolutionary algorithms with…

Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…

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…

Games have always been a popular test bed for artificial intelligence techniques. Game developers are always in constant search for techniques that can automatically create computer games minimizing the developer's task. In this work we…

Machine playtesting tools and game moment search engines require exposure to the diversity of a game's state space if they are to report on or index the most interesting moments of possible play. Meanwhile, mobile app distribution services…

We consider multi-player games played on graphs, in which the players aim at fulfilling their own (not necessarily antagonistic) objectives. In the spirit of evolutionary game theory, we suppose that the players have the right to repeatedly…

The diversity of agent behaviors is an important topic for the quality of video games and virtual environments in general. Offering the most compelling experience for users with different skills is a difficult task, and usually needs…

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…

Automated game design is the problem of automatically producing games through computational processes. Traditionally, these methods have relied on the authoring of search spaces by a designer, defining the space of all possible games for…

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…

Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…

We present a new concept called Game Mechanic Alignment theory as a way to organize game mechanics through the lens of systemic rewards and agential motivations. By disentangling player and systemic influences, mechanics may be better…

World-building, the process of developing both the narrative and physical world of a game, plays a vital role in the game's experience. Critically-acclaimed independent and AAA video games are praised for strong world-building, with game…