Automatic evolution of programs for procedural generation of terrains for video games: Accessibility and edge length constraints

Abstract

Nowadays the video game industry is facing a big challenge to keep costs under control as games become bigger and more complex. Creation of game content, such as character models, maps, levels, textures, sound effects and so on, represent a big slice of total game production cost. Hence, the video game industry is increasingly turning to procedural content generation to amplify the cost-effectiveness of the efforts of video game designers. However, procedural methods for automated content generation are difficult to create and parametrize. In this work we study a genetic programming-based procedural content technique to generate procedural terrains that do not require parametrization, thus, allowing to save time and help reducing production costs. Generated procedural terrains present aesthetic appeal; however, unlike most techniques involving aesthetic, our approach does not require a human to perform the evaluation. Instead, the search is guided by the weighted sum of two morphological metrics: terrain accessibility and obstacle edge length. The combination of the two metrics allowed us to find a wide range of fit terrains that present more scattered obstacles in different locations than our previous approach with a single metric. Procedural terrains produced by this technique are already in use in a real video game. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.