Procedural Content Generation for video game levels with human advice
Date
2023-07
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Abstract
Video gaming is an extremely popular form of entertainment around the world and new video game releases are constantly being showcased. One issue with the video gaming industry is that game developers require a large amount of time to develop new content. A research field that can help with this is procedural content generation (PCG) which allows for an infinite number of video game levels to be generated based on the parameters provided. Many of the methods found in literature can generate content reliably that adhere to quantifiable characteristics such as playability, solvability and difficulty. These methods do not however, take into account the aesthetics of the level which is the parameter that makes them more reasonable levels for human players. In order to address this issue, we propose a method of incorporating high level human advice into the PCG loop. The method uses pairwise comparisons as a way in which a score can be assigned to a level based on its aesthetics. Using the score along with a feature vector describing each level, an SVR model is trained that will allow for a score to be assigned to unseen video game levels. This predicted score is used as an additional fitness function of a multi objective genetic algorithm (GA) and can be optimised as a standard fitness function would. We test the proposed method on two 2D platformer video games, Maze and Super Mario Bros (SMB), and our results show that the proposed method can successfully be used to generate levels with a bias towards the human preferred aesthetical features, whilst still adhering to standard video game characteristics such as solvability. We further investigate incorporating multiple inputs from a human at different stages of the PCG life cycle and find that it does improve the proposed method, but further testing is still required. The findings of this research is hopefully going to assist in using PCG in the video game space to create levels that are more aesthetically pleasing to a human player.
Description
A research report submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science, to the Faculty of Science, School of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023.
Keywords
Procedural content generation (PCG), Genetic algorithm (GA), TrueSkill, Support Vector Regression (SVR), Pairwise Comparison, Image features, Super Mario Bros (SMB), Fitness function, Maze, UCTD
Citation
Raal, Nicholas Oliver. (2023). Procedural Content Generation for video game levels with human advice. [Master's dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/42891