Tower defense is a popular subgenre of real-time strategy game requiring detailed level design and difficulty balancing to create an enjoyable player experience. Because level production and testing are both time-consuming and labor-intensive, we propose and implement a framework to automate the process. We first analyze the three main components, or "building blocks", of the popular tower defense game Kingdom Rush: Frontiers (KRF), i.e. road maps, tower locations and monster sequences. We then automatically create new building blocks in the style of the original game, utilizing techniques from Procedural Content Generation (PCG), and assemble them to create new levels. We also add a fourth block: automated testing via a Monte Carlo search algorithm, to ensure the generated content is playable. We focus on KRF because it is a popular video game in the tower defense genre, and highlights some of the challenges of designing appropriate PCG and playtesting algorithms for a commercial video game.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.