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Piecemeal Evolution of a First Person Shooter Level

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Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10784))

Abstract

This paper describes an iterative process for generating multi-story shooter game levels by means of interlocking rooms evolved individually. The process is highly controllable by a human designer who can specify the entrances to this room as well as its size, its distribution of game objects and its architectural patterns. The small size of each room allows for computationally fast evaluations of several level qualities, but these rooms can be combined into a much larger shooter game level. Each room has two floors and is generated iteratively, with two stages of evolution and two stages of constructive post-processing. Experiments in generating an arena-based level for two teams spawning in different rooms demonstrate that the placement and allocation of entrances on each floor have a strong effect on the patterns of the final level.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interior jigsaw pieces is a term used by a Blizzard employee on the Blizzard forums under the nickname Bashiok.

  2. 2.

    A talk by Luiz Kruel at the 2017 Game Development Conference (GDC) highlighted the generative pipeline followed in this paper, focusing on the transformation of the top-level views of this approach into 3D levels.

  3. 3.

    Unlike [21], health pickups are not included following discussions with game designers who did not consider them necessary; health pickups they easily be placed in a constructive fashion post-generation or omitted due to re-generating health.

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Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 693150. The generator was the result of a collaboration with Luiz Kruel, who provided valuable feedback on level patterns and designer constraints for using the system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Antonios Liapis

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  1. Antonios Liapis
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Correspondence to Antonios Liapis .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

    Kevin Sim

  2. Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Paul Kaufmann

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Liapis, A. (2018). Piecemeal Evolution of a First Person Shooter Level. In: Sim, K., Kaufmann, P. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10784. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77538-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77538-8_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77537-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77538-8

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