Automatic Generation of Dungeons for Computer Games

Abstract

The genre of dungeon games, or first-person shooter games as they are more commonly known, has emerged over the last ten years to become one of the most popular types of computer game. At present, the levels in this type of game are generated manually, which is a very expensive and time-consuming process for games companies. If levels could be generated automatically then this would not only reduce development costs, but allow levels to be generated at run-time, giving game players a new playing experience each time a game was played and greatly improving the replayability of the game. In this project, a technique known as graph grammars will be used in order to allow descriptions of randomly generated game levels to be created automatically. As part of the project, algorithms to assess the size, difficulty and fun-value of a level will be developed, to allow individual levels to be tailored to particular requirements. This project is being undertaken in cooperation with Infogrames.