Procedural puzzle generation: A survey

Abstract

Procedural content generation (PCG) for games has existed since the 1980s and is becoming increasingly important for creating game worlds, backstory, and characters across many genres, in particular, open-world games, such as Minecraft (2011) and No Man's Sky (2016). A particular challenge faced by such games is that the content and/or gameplay may become repetitive. Puzzles constitute an effective technique for improving gameplay by offering players interesting problems to solve, but the use of PCG for generating puzzles has been limited compared with its use for other game elements, and efforts have focused mainly on games that are strictly puzzle games, rather than creating puzzles to be incorporated into other genres. Nevertheless, a significant body of work exists, which allows puzzles of different types to be generated algorithmically, and there is scope for much more research into this area. This paper presents a detailed survey of existing work in PCG for puzzles, reviewing 32 methods within 11 categories of puzzles. For the purpose of analysis, this paper identifies a total of seven salient characteristics related to the methods, which are used to show commonalities and differences between techniques and to chart promising areas for future research.