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Video games often include various creatures within their games, these creatures often give the world in which they inhabit a richer experience for the player. Creating these creatures can be costly, to lower these costs procedural content generated creatures could be used instead. Creatures created with PCG will have a lower upfront cost but comes with the downside of less control without a large amount of testing. This is a problem, what we have tried to do is lessening the amount of time needed to achieve the desired level of perfection. In this paper we have tried to find patterns which will further help the use of procedural content generated creatures. The game Forest Moon will be introduced to gather data and to find pattern of how players interact from various visual cues. With the data we have gained further understanding on how players react and what kind of emotions they feel when certain visual cues are presented.

Procedural Content Generation innebär att spelinnehåll automatiskt genereras för att dels både öka variationen i spel dels och minska arbetsbelastningen hos designers. Ett användningsområde för detta är rumbaserad bangenerering. Målet med detta  här arbetet är var att jämföra två algoritmer som gör just detta:; Binary Space Partitioning och Delaunay Triangulation. De kriterier som algoritmerna utvärderades på var tidseffektivitet, variation, likhet och möjligheten att nå alla rum. Resultatet visade att Binary Space Partitioning hade snabbare genereringstid samtidigt som Delaunay Triangulation gav utvecklaren mer valmöjligheter. Vilken algoritm som var att föredra ifall tidsaspekten inte bar mest tyngd blev helt en en mestadels subjektiv fråga där varje enskild utvecklares önskemål kommer påverka svaret. Ifall arbetet skulle fortsättas i framtiden skulle det vara intressant att utföra fler tester med flera olika mätvärden samt använda algoritmerna i ett spel och sedan påta låta spelare testare bedöma kvalitén hos banorna som genereras.

The use of procedural content generation is becoming more and more popular in the video game industry. With games such as Minecraft or No Man’s Sky we have seen the potential of PCG in video game creation but also its challenges. In fact, while the processing power and memory capabilities of our machines are unceasingly growing, human capability for content creation doesn’t seem to be able to follow the same pace. Game developers had then to come up with several techniques and methods that will help them generate lots of content for their games while still keeping a certain level of control on the output. Urbis Terram is a procedural city generation tool for Unity3D that allows the creation of complete cities to be used in video games or simulations made with this engine. The goal of this thesis is to tackle the technical challenge of designing and implementing a PCG tool that will help game developers to quickly generate terrains, road networks and allotment spaces for buildings and other urban areas. The goal is to have a unique complete city generation tool that can enable quick game design iterations and can be used to create complex virtual worlds.

Games are irritating when they are too hard, and boring when they are too easy. Level Eight is a game development company which is, during this project, developing an endless runner. This thesis describes research and implementation of a dynamic difficulty adjustment system in Level Eights’ endless runner by considering several conditions of the player. This was accomplished with the help of the game environment by implementing procedural content generation and combine it with the dynamic difficulty adjustment system. / Spel är irriterande när de är för svåra, och tråkiga när de är för lätta. Level Eight är ett spelutvecklingsföretag som under detta projekt utvecklar ett ändlöst löparspel. Denna avhandling beskriver forskning och genomförande av ett dynamiskt svårighets justeringssystem i Level Eights ändlöst löparspel genom att överväga flera villkor för spelaren. Detta uppnåddes med hjälp av spelmiljön genom att implementera procedurell innehållsgenerering och kombinera den med det dynamiska svårighets justering systemet.

Submitted by Marco Antônio de Ramos Chagas (mchagas@ufv.br) on 2016-09-09T18:25:14Z No. of bitstreams: 1 texto completo.pdf: 2101606 bytes, checksum: c4227b09a3bae62b835f5aabafc917b3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-09T18:25:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 texto completo.pdf: 2101606 bytes, checksum: c4227b09a3bae62b835f5aabafc917b3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-05-25 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Neste trabalho apresentamos um modelo computacional baseado em teorias de design para gerar mapas de jogos de plataforma visualmente agradáveis. Nós estudamos o problema de geração de mapas como um problema de otimização e provamos que uma versão simplificada do problema é computacionalmente difícil. Em seguida, propomos uma abordagem de busca heurística para resolver o problema de geração de mapas e utilizamos ela para gerar níveis de um clone do Super Mario Bros (SMB), chamado Infinite Mario Bros (IMB). Antes de avaliar os níveis de IMB gerados pelo nosso sistema, realizamos um estudo detalhado das abordagens comumente utilizadas para avaliar o conteúdo gerado por programas de computador. A avaliação utilizada em trabalhos anteriores utiliza apenas métricas computacionais. Embora esses indicadores são importantes para uma avaliação inicial e exploratória do conteúdo gerado, não é claro se são capazes de capturar a percepção do jogador sobre o conteúdo gerado. Neste trabalho, comparamos os conhecimentos adquiridos a partir de um estudo com seres humanos usando níveis de IMB gerados por diferentes sistemas, com os conhecimentos adquiridos a partir de análise dos valores de métricas computacionais. Os nossos resultados sugerem que as m ́etricas computacionais atuais não devem substituir estudos com seres humanos para avaliar o conteúdo gerado por programas de computador. Usando os conhecimentos adquiridos em nosso experimento anterior, foi realizado outro estudo com seres humanos para avaliar os níveis de IMB gerados pelo nosso método. Os resultados mostram a vantagem do nosso método em relação a outras abordagens em termos de estética visual e diversão. Finalmente, foi realizado outro estudo com seres humanos, mostrando que o nosso método é capaz de gerar níveis de IMB semelhantes aos níveis de SMB criados por designers profissionais. / In this work we introduce a computational model based on theories of graphical design to generate visually pleasing video game maps. We cast the problem of map generation as an optimization problem and prove it to be computationally hard. Then, we propose a heuristic search approach to solve the map generation problem and use it to generate levels of a clone of Super Mario Bros (SMB) called Infinite Mario Bros (IMB). Before evaluating the levels of IMB generated by our system, we perform a detailed study of the approaches commonly used to evaluate the content generated by computer programs. The evaluation used in previous works often relies on computational metrics. While these metrics are important for an initial exploratory evaluation of the content generated, it is not clear whether they are able to capture the player’s perception of the content generated. In this work we compare the insights gained from a user study with IMB levels generated by different systems with the insights gained from analyzing computational metric values. Our results suggest that current computational metrics should not be used in lieu of user studies for evaluating content generated by computer programs. Using the insights gained in our previous experiment, we performed another user study to evaluate the IMB levels generated by our method. The results show the advantage of our method over other approaches in terms of visual aesthetics and enjoyment. Finally, we performed one last user study that showed that our method is able to generate IMB levels with striking similarity to SMB levels created by professional designers. / Autor sem Lattes e arquivo PDF não criptografou

Procedural content generation (PCG) is increasingly used to generate many aspects in a variety of games. AI players, both hand scripted or also generated (by AI methods), are used to evaluate this content. Comparatively little effort is invested in using PCG to generate the whole game, including its rules. In this thesis, we use evolutionary algorithms to generate the game rules, its content and the evaluating AI player on a narrow, but flourishing, genre of endless runners - games where the player is constantly running. For this purpose, we have implemented a framework for creating endless runner games. Our approach could provide more efficiency for game designers, explore completely new game concepts in endless runners, platformer games, and be further generalized to other game genres.

Context. Game development is a costly process and with today's advanced hardware the customers are asking for more playable content, and at higher quality. For many years providing this content procedurally has been done for level creation, modeling, and animation. However, there are games that require content in other forms, such as executable quests that progress the game forward. Quests have been procedurally generated to some extent, but not in enough detail to be usable for game development without providing a handwritten description of the quest. Objectives. In this study we combine a procedural content generation structure for quests with a natural language generation approach to generate a descriptive summarized text for quests, and examine whether the resulting texts are viable as quest prototypes for use in game development. Methods. A number of articles on the area of natural language generation is used to determine an appropriate way of validating the generated texts produced in this study, which concludes that a user case study is appropriate to evaluate each text for a set of statements. Results. 30 texts were generated and evaluated from ten different quest structures, where the majority of the texts were found to be good enough to be used for game development purposes. Conclusions. We conclude that quests can be procedurally generated in more detail by incorporating natural language generation. However, the quest structure used for this study needs to expand into more detail at certain structure components in order to fully support an automated system in a flexible manner. Furthermore due to semantics and grammatics being key components in the flow and usability of a text, a more sophisticated system needs to be implemented using more advanced techniques of natural language generation.

The modeling of trees is challenging due to their complex branching structures. Three different ways to generate trees are using real world data for reconstruction, interactive modeling methods and modeling with procedural or rule-based systems. Procedural content generation is the idea of using algorithms to automate content creation processes, and it is useful in plant modeling since it can generate a wide variety of plants that can adapt and react to the environment and changing conditions. This thesis focuses on and extends a procedural tree generation technique that uses a space colonization algorithm to model the tree branches' competition for space, and shifts the previous works' focus from realism to fantasy. The technique satisfied the idea of using interaction between the tree's internal and external factors to determine its final shape, by letting the designer control the where and the how of the tree's growth process. The implementation resulted in a tree generation application where the user's imagination decides the limit of what can be produced, and if that limit is reached can the application be used to randomly generate a wide variety of trees and tree-like structures. A motivation for many researchers in the procedural content generation area is how it can be used to augment human imagination. The result of this thesis can be used for that, by stepping away from the restrictions of realism, and with ease let the user generate widely diverse trees, that are not necessarily realistic but, in most cases, adapts to the idea of a tree.

Computer games have always become more and more advanced. One of the biggest reasons to its rapid evolution is the use of procedural content generation (PCG), which is used to generate game content automatically. However, there is one type of games that is more unexplored when it comes to PCG, namely motion games. Motion games are games where the player interacts with the game by moving his own body rather than using a gamepad, mouse or keyboard. Thanks to that, motion games are a healthier alternative to regular games, and this thesis therefore explores the possibilities to use PCG to develop more exciting motion games. The focus lies on achieving variation and progression since both of those are important concepts closely related to PCG. An exploratory case study is also conducted to examine how the derived guidelines work in a real game. The result concluded is that the guidelines seem to work well, but that all of them are not easily adapted to every game. Different game genres therefore call for different guidelines to be used.