11 research outputs found
Learning the Designer's Preferences to Drive Evolution
This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution
that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity
Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the
user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content
with respect to that user's preferences. Through this approach, we aim for
increasing the user's agency over the generated content in a way that neither
stalls the user-tool reciprocal stimuli loop nor fatigues the user with
periodical suggestion handpicking. We describe the details of this novel
solution, as well as its implementation in the MI-CC tool the Evolutionary
Dungeon Designer. We present and discuss our findings out of the initial tests
carried out, spotting the open challenges for this combined line of research
that integrates MI-CC with Procedural Content Generation through Machine
Learning.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted and to appear in proceedings of the 23rd European
Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation,
EvoApplications 202
Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry
While the games industry is moving towards procedural content
generation (PCG) with tools available under popular platforms such as Unreal, Unity or Houdini, and video game titles like No Man’s Sky and Horizon Zero Dawn taking advantage ofPCG, the gap between academia and industry is as wide as it has ever been, in terms of communication and sharing methods. One of the authors, has worked on both sides of this gap and in an effort to shorten it and increase the synergy between the two sectors, has identified three design pillars for PCG using mixed-initiative interfaces. The three pillars are Respect Designer Control, Respect the Creative Process and Respect Existing Work Processes. Respecting designer control is about creating a tool that gives enough control to bring out the designer’s vision. Respecting the creative process concerns itself with having a feedback loop that is short enough, that the creative process is not disturbed. Respecting existing work processes means that a PCG tool should plug in easily to existing asset pipelines. As academics and communicators, it is surprising that publications often do not describe ways for developers to use our work or lack considerations for how a piece ofwork might fit into existing content pipelines
Pitako -- Recommending Game Design Elements in Cicero
Recommender Systems are widely and successfully applied in e-commerce. Could
they be used for design? In this paper, we introduce Pitako1, a tool that
applies the Recommender System concept to assist humans in creative tasks. More
specifically, Pitako provides suggestions by taking games designed by humans as
inputs, and recommends mechanics and dynamics as outputs. Pitako is implemented
as a new system within the mixed-initiative AI-based Game Design Assistant,
Cicero. This paper discusses the motivation behind the implementation of Pitako
as well as its technical details and presents usage examples. We believe that
Pitako can influence the use of recommender systems to help humans in their
daily tasks.Comment: Paper accepted in the IEEE Conference on Games 2019 (COG 2019
Evaluating Mixed-Initiative Procedural Level Design Tools using a Triple-Blind Mixed-Method User Study
Results from a triple-blind mixed-method user study into the effectiveness of mixed-initiative tools for the procedural generation of game levels are presented. A tool which generates levels using interactive evolutionary optimisation was designed for this study which (a) is focused on supporting the designer to explore the design space and (b) only requires the designer to interact with it by designing levels. The tool identifies level design patterns in an initial hand-designed map and uses that information to drive an interactive optimisation algorithm. A rigorous user study was designed which compared the experiences of designers using the mixed-initiative tool to designers who were given a tool which provided completely random level suggestions. The designers using the mixed-initiative tool showed an increased engagement in the level design task, reporting that it was effective in inspiring new ideas and design directions. This provides significant evidence that procedural content generation can be used as a powerful tool to support the human design process
Graph-based Generation of Action-Adventure Dungeon Levels using Answer Set Programming
The construction of dungeons in typical action-adventure computer games entails composing a complex arrangement of structural and temporal dependencies. It is not simple to generate dungeons with correct lock-and-key structures. In this paper we sketch a controllable approach to building graph-based models of acyclic dungeon levels via declarative constraint solving, that is capable of satisfying a range of hard gameplay and design constraints. We use a quantitative expressive range analysis to characterise the initial output of the system, present an example of the degree to which the output may be altered, and show a comparison with an alternate approach
10 years of the PCG workshop : past and future trends
As of 2020, the international workshop on Procedural Content Generation enters its second decade. The annual workshop, hosted by
the international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games,
has collected a corpus of 95 papers published in its first 10 years.
This paper provides an overview of the workshop’s activities and
surveys the prevalent research topics emerging over the years.peer-reviewe