Piecemeal Evolution of a First Person Shooter Level

Abstract

This paper describes an iterative process for generating multi-story shooter game levels by means of interlocking rooms evolved individually. The process is highly controllable by a human designer who can specify the entrances to this room as well as its size, its distribution of game objects and its architectural patterns. The small size of each room allows for computationally fast evaluations of several level qualities, but these rooms can be combined into a much larger shooter game level. Each room has two floors and is generated iteratively, with two stages of evolution and two stages of constructive post-processing. Experiments in generating an arena-based level for two teams spawning in different rooms demonstrate that the placement and allocation of entrances on each floor have a strong effect on the patterns of the final level.