Automated Playtesting of Matching Tile Games

Matching tile games are an extremely popular game genre. Arguably the most popular iteration, Match-3 games, are simple to understand puzzle games, making them great benchmarks for research. In this paper, we propose developing different procedural personas for Match-3 games in order to approximate different human playstyles to create an automated playtesting system. The procedural personas are realized through evolving the utility function for the Monte Carlo Tree Search agent. We compare the performance and results of the evolution agents with the standard Vanilla Monte Carlo Tree Search implementation as well as to a random move-selection agent. We then observe the impacts on both the game’s design and the game design process. Lastly, a user study is performed to compare the agents to human play traces.

[1]  W. Marsden.  I and J , 2012 .

[2]  T. Cazenave.  Evolving Monte-Carlo Tree Search Algorithms , 2007 .

[3]  Moshe Sipper,et al.  EvoMCTS: Enhancing MCTS-based players through genetic programming , 2013, 2013 IEEE Conference on Computational Inteligence in Games (CIG).

[4]  Gita Reese Sukthankar,et al.  Learning Policies for First Person Shooter Games Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning , 2011, AIIDE.

[5]  Csaba Szepesvári,et al.  Bandit Based Monte-Carlo Planning , 2006, ECML.

[6]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Evolving personas for player decision modeling , 2014, 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[7]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Generative agents for player decision modeling in games , 2014, FDG.

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

[9]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Automated Playtesting With Procedural Personas Through MCTS With Evolved Heuristics , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Games.

[10]  Simon M. Lucas,et al.  A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods , 2012, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[11]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Defining personas in games using metrics , 2008, Future Play.

[12]  Alessandro Canossa,et al.  Patterns of Play: Play-Personas in User-Centred Game Development , 2009, DiGRA Conference.