A Controllable Co-Creative Agent for Game System Design
This addresses the need for more flexible and creative tools for game designers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing procedural content generation and co-creativity concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of limited genre-specific co-creative systems for game design by developing a controllable agent that models games abstractly using state-machine components and resource flows, and found it capable of expressing a wide range of games while being human-controllable for collaboration.
Many advancements have been made in procedural content generation for games, and with mixed-initiative co-creativity, have the potential for great benefits to human designers. However, co-creative systems for game generation are typically limited to specific genres, rules, or games, limiting the creativity of the designer. We seek to model games abstractly enough to apply to any genre, focusing on designing game systems and mechanics, and create a controllable, co-creative agent that can collaborate on these designs. We present a model of games using state-machine-like components and resource flows, a set of controllable metrics, a design evaluator simulating playthroughs with these metrics, and an evolutionary design balancer and generator. We find this system to be both able to express a wide range of games and able to be human-controllable for future co-creative applications.