Automatic Game Design via Mechanic Generation
This work addresses the challenge of automating game design for developers, but it is incremental as it focuses on early steps in mechanic generation without broad application or SOTA results.
The authors tackled the problem of automatically generating game mechanics for computer games by developing a system that uses a composable representation and constraint solver to create mechanics, then tests them with a planner for playability, demonstrating it across role-playing, platformer, and hybrid game genres.
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 cross-domain representation for game mechanics that draws from AI planning action representations. We use a constraint solver to generate mechanics subject to design requirements on the form of those mechanics---what they do in the game. A planner takes a set of generated mechanics and tests whether those mechanics meet playability requirements---controlling how mechanics function in a game to affect player behavior. We demonstrate our system by modeling and generating mechanics in a role-playing game, platformer game, and combined role-playing-platformer game.