Abstract
We introduce Mechanic Miner, an evolutionary system for discovering simple two-state game mechanics for puzzle platform games. We demonstrate how a reflection-driven generation technique can use a simulation of gameplay to select good mechanics, and how the simulation-driven process can be inverted to produce challenging levels specific to a generated mechanic. We give examples of levels and mechanics generated by the system, summarise a small pilot study conducted with example levels and mechanics, and point to further applications of the technique, including applications to automated game design.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Cardamone, L., Yannakakis, G.N., Togelius, J., Lanzi, P.L.: Evolving Interesting Maps for a First Person Shooter. In: Di Chio, C., Cagnoni, S., Cotta, C., Ebner, M., Ekárt, A., Esparcia-Alcázar, A.I., Merelo, J.J., Neri, F., Preuss, M., Richter, H., Togelius, J., Yannakakis, G.N. (eds.) EvoApplications 2011, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6624, pp. 63–72. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Cook, M., Colton, S.: Multi-faceted evolution of simple arcade games. In: Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (2011)
Colton, S., Wiggins, G.: Computational creativity: The final frontier? In: Proc. of the 21st European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2012)
Nelson, M.J., Mateas, M.: Towards Automated Game Design. In: Basili, R., Pazienza, M.T. (eds.) AI*IA 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4733, pp. 626–637. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Smith, G., Othenin-Girard, A., Whitehead, J., Wardrip-Fruin, N.: PCG-based game design: creating endless web. In: Proc. of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG (2012)
Togelius, J., Schmidhuber, J.: An experiment in automatic game design. In: Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (2008)
Treanor, M., Blackford, B., Mateas, M., Bogost, I.: Game-o-matic: Generating videogames that represent ideas. In: Proc. of the Third Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, FDG 2012 (2012)
Treanor, M., Schweizer, B., Bogost, I., Mateas, M.: The micro-rhetorics of game-o-matic. In: Proc. of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG (2012)
GNILLEY, Radix (2010), http://www.gnilley.com/
Offspring Fling, KPULV (2011), http://offspringfling.com/
VVVVVV, Terry Cavanaugh (2010), http://www.thelettervsixtim.es
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cook, M., Colton, S., Raad, A., Gow, J. (2013). Mechanic Miner: Reflection-Driven Game Mechanic Discovery and Level Design. In: Esparcia-Alcázar, A.I. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7835. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37192-9_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37192-9_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37191-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37192-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)