Procedural content generation for games

Abstract

Hundreds of millions of people play computer games every day. For them, game content—from 3D objects to abstract puzzles—plays a major entertainment role. Manual labor has so far ensured that the quality and quantity of game content matched the demands of the playing community, but is facing new scalability challenges due to the exponential growth over the last decade of both the gamer population and the production costs. Procedural Content Generation for Games (PCG-G) may address these challenges by automating, or aiding in, game content generation. PCG-G is difficult, since the generator has to create the content, satisfy constraints imposed by the artist, and return interesting instances for gamers. Despite a large body of research focusing on PCG-G, particularly over the past decade, ours is the first comprehensive survey of the field of PCG-G. We first introduce a comprehensive, six-layered taxonomy of game content: bits, space, systems, scenarios, design, and derived. Second, we survey the methods used across the whole field of PCG-G from a large research body. Third, we map PCG-G methods to game content layers; it turns out that many of the methods used to generate game content from one layer can be used to generate content from another. We also survey the use of methods in practice, that is, in commercial or prototype games. Fourth and last, we discuss several directions for future research in PCG-G, which we believe deserve close attention in the near future.

Critical Success Factors to Improve the Game Development Process from a Developer’s Perspective

“…Actually, game assets include any piece of data that can be used by a game engine aside from code, scripts, and documentation. The elementary unit of game assets can be referred to as a game bit [58] and typically has no value when considered independently. There are two categories of bits: characters, which can be an asset that interacts in a simulated environment, and abstract bits, which are kinds of sound and texture that can be used together to produce a concrete bit.…”

“…De Carli et al [59] and Hendrikx et al [58] carried out a survey of procedural content generation techniques for game development. Animation in games is considered an important asset because it has a great impact on game performance [60] .…”

A Spatially-Structured PCG Method for Content Diversity in a Physics-Based Simulation Game

“…One of the most promising areas in this field is Procedural Content Generation (PCG) which consists of generating game content through algorithms instead of creating it by hand, and refers to each component that makes up a video game except from the behaviour of the non-playable characters (NPCs) [2,3]. Some examples of content susceptible to generation are maps, terrains, weapons, items, music or even the game's rules [4].…”

“…Presently, procedural content generation is a vibrant field of research with a large number of papers related to these techniques (the reader can find an analysis about the diversity of the content that may be generated in a procedural manner in [3]). A recurring objective is to generate levels/maps for a platform game.…”

Rogue-Like Games as a Playground for Artificial Intelligence – Evolutionary Approach

“…Procedural generation [14] has been used in many kinds of games [17,5], and thus, the call for high-quality PCG is clear [8]. However, evaluating the PCG brings issues [4,16], such as how to balance between the criteria of high quality and high variability.…”