The challenge of Automatic Level Generation for platform videogames based on St...

• Author(s): Mourato, Fausto ; Birra, Fernando ; Santos, Manuel Próspero dos
• Date: 2013
• Origin: Repositório Comum
• Subject(s): Algorithms; Design; Experimentation; Human factors; Platform videogames; Procedural Content Generation; Automated Game Design
• Document Type: Preprint
• Language: English

Description

In this article we bring the concepts of narrativism and ludology to automatic level generation for platform videogames. The initial motivation is to understand how this genre has been used as a storytelling medium. Based on a narrative theory of games, the differences among several titles have been identified. In addition, we propose a set of abstraction layers to describe the content of a quest-based story in the particular context of videogames. Regarding automatic level generation for platform videogames, we observed that the existing approaches are directed to lower abstraction concepts such as avatar movements without a particular context or meaning. This leads us to the challenge of automatically creating more contextualized levels rather than only a set of consistent and playable entertaining tasks. With that in mind, a set of higher level design patterns are presented and their potential usages are envisioned and discussed.