Generating levels that teach mechanics

The automatic generation of game tutorials is a challenging AI problem. While it is possible to generate annotations and instructions that explain to the player how the game is played, this paper focuses on generating a gameplay experience that introduces the player to a game mechanic. It evolves small levels for the Mario AI Framework that can only be beaten by an agent that knows how to perform specific actions in the game. It uses variations of a perfect A* agent that are limited in various ways, such as not being able to jump high or see enemies, to test how failing to do certain actions can stop the player from beating the level.

[1]  Simon Colton,et al.  Mechanic Miner: Reflection-Driven Game Mechanic Discovery and Level Design , 2013, EvoApplications.

[2]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Towards a Video Game Description Language , 2013, Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games.

[3]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Automatic mapping of NES games with mappy , 2017, FDG.

[4]  Anna Anthropy,et al.  A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design , 2014 .

[5]  Julian Togelius,et al.  AtDELFI: automatically designing legible, full instructions for games , 2018, FDG.

[6]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Artificial Intelligence and Games , 2018, Springer International Publishing.

[7]  Steven Orla Kimbrough,et al.  On a Feasible-Infeasible Two-Population (FI-2Pop) genetic algorithm for constrained optimization: Distance tracing and no free lunch , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[8]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Launchpad: A Rhythm-Based Level Generator for 2-D Platformers , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[9]  Julian Togelius,et al.  A comparative evaluation of procedural level generators in the Mario AI framework , 2014, FDG.

[10]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Decomposing the level generation problem with tiles , 2011, 2011 IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation (CEC).

[11]  George W. Fitzmaurice,et al.  TutorialPlan: Automated Tutorial Generation from CAD Drawings , 2013, IJCAI.

[12]  Philippe Pasquier,et al.  Towards a Generic Framework for Automated Video Game Level Creation , 2010, EvoApplications.

[13]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Search-Based Procedural Generation of Maze-Like Levels , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[14]  Ahmed Khalifa,et al.  Automatic Puzzle Level Generation: A General Approach using a Description Language , 2015 .

[15]  Chris Martens,et al.  Deriving quests from open world mechanics , 2017, FDG.

[16]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The search-based approach , 2016 .

[17]  Daniel A. Ashlock.  Evolvable fashion-based cellular automata for generating cavern systems , 2015, 2015 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG).

[18]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Depth in Strategic Games , 2017, AAAI Workshops.

[19]  Zoran Popovic,et al.  A case study of expressively constrainable level design automation tools for a puzzle game , 2012, FDG.

[20]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Talakat: bullet hell generation through constrained map-elites , 2018, GECCO.

[21]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Patterns as Objectives for Level Generation , 2013 .

[22]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The Mario AI Benchmark and Competitions , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[23]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Feature analysis for modeling game content quality , 2011, 2011 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG'11).

[24]  Chris Martens,et al.  From Mechanics to Meaning , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Games.

[25]  Santiago Ontañón,et al.  The VGLC: The Video Game Level Corpus , 2016, ArXiv.

[26]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Generating beginner heuristics for simple texas hold'em , 2018, GECCO.

[27]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Game-O-Matic: Generating Videogames that Represent Ideas , 2012, PCG@FDG.

[28]  Julian Togelius,et al.  General Video Game Level Generation , 2016, GECCO.

[29]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The Mario AI Championship 2009-2012 , 2013, AI Mag..

[30]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Generating heuristics for novice players , 2016, 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG).

[31]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Generating Novice Heuristics for Post-Flop Poker , 2018, 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG).

[32]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The 2010 Mario AI Championship: Level Generation Track , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[33]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The 2009 Mario AI Competition , 2010, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

[34]  Julian Togelius,et al.  "Press Space to Fire": Automatic Video Game Tutorial Generation , 2017, AIIDE Workshops.

[35]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Automatic generation of game elements via evolution , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.