Procedural Game Level Design to Trigger Spatial Exploration.

Synthesizing game levels that evoke players’ curiosity, driving them to explore different level parts, is time-consuming and tedious. Typically, game level designers manually perform this synthesis using trial and error. In this paper, we propose a method with which to replace this manual, time-consuming process. We benefited from recent work that had proposed game level design patterns to evoke curiosity, and we propose an approach to automatically synthesizing game levels in order to encourage players to pursue designer-specified exploration goals. We started by creating a dataset of level assets, based on the four design patterns that evoke curiosity-driven exploration in games (reaching extreme points, resolving visual obstructions, out-of-place objects, and understanding spatial connections). We annotated the assets in our dataset with spatial exploration measurements (the time players took to explore an asset over their total time spent in the game level). We then formulated game level design as an optimization problem, encoding both spatial exploration (mean spatial exploration, spatial exploration variance, and spatial exploration distribution) and game level design (occupied area, adjacent penalty, and height distribution) decisions. Then, we solved this problem by implementing a reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo method. We demonstrate our method’s ability to synthesize game level variations with different spatial exploration and level design decisions. Finally, a user study showed that our approach can automatically synthesize game levels, encouraging a certain amount of spatial exploration by players.