Procedural Content Generation for Real-Time Strategy Games

Abstract

-Videogames are one of the most important and profitable sectors in the industry of entertainment. Nowadays, the creation of a videogame is often a large-scale endeavor and bears many similarities with, e.g., movie production. On the central tasks in the development of a videogame is content generation, namely the definition of maps, terrains, non-player characters (NPCs) and other graphical, musical and AI-related components of the game. Such generation is costly due to its complexity, the great amount of work required and the need of specialized manpower. Hence the relevance of optimizing the process and alleviating costs. In this sense, procedural content generation (PCG) comes in handy as a means of reducing costs by using algorithmic techniques to automatically generate some game contents. PCG also provides advantages in terms of player experience since the contents generated are typically not fixed but can vary in different playing sessions, and can even adapt to the player herself. For this purpose, the underlying algorithmic technique used for PCG must be also flexible and adaptable. This is the case of computational intelligence in general and evolutionary algorithms in particular. In this work we shall provide an overview of the use of evolutionary intelligence for PCG, with special emphasis on its use within the context of realtime strategy games. We shall show how these techniques can address both playability and aesthetics, as well as improving the game AI.

A taxonomy and state of the art revision on affective games

“…Some examples of this kind of works are developing new gameplay mechanics capable of trigger new emotions on the players, and devising algorithms that adapt the game to the perceived emotional status of the player. Regarding this category, there is an interesting symbiosis between affective games and procedural content generation research communities [12], as the former could use the techniques developed by the latter as a way to automatically create new content for the videogame that is suitable for the emotional state of the player.…”

Procedural Generation of Levels for Angry Birds Style Physics Games

“…Previous research into PLG has explored its applicability to many different game genres. These include platform (Mourato, dos Santos, and Birra 2011), racing (Cardamone, Loiacono, and Lanzi 2011), role-playing (Valtchanov and Brown 2012), arcade (Cook and Colton 2011), stealth (Xu, Tremblay, and Verbrugge 2014), roguelike (Stammer et al 2015) and real-time strategy (Lara-Cabrera et al 2015). Several papers have also explored the use of PLG for physicsbased puzzle games, most notably for the Cut the Rope…”