Self-learning mechanism for mobile game adjustment towards a player

Abstract

Mobile app markets have faced huge expansion during the last decade. Among different apps, games represent a large portion with a wide range of game categories having consumers in all age groups. To make a mobile game suitable for different age categories, it is necessary to adjust difficulty levels in such a way to keep the game challenging for different players with different playing skills. The mobile app puzzle game Wonderful Animals has been developed consisting of puzzles, find pairs and find differences game (available on the Google Play Store). The game testing was conducted on a group of 40 players by recording game level completion time and conducting a survey of their subjective evaluation of completed level difficulty. The study aimed to find a mechanism to adjust game level difficulty to the individual player taking into account the player’s achievements on previously played games. A pseudo-algorithm for self-learning mechanism is presented, enabling level difficulty adaptation to the player. Furthermore, player classification into three classes using neural networks is suggested in order to offer a user-specific playing environment. The experimental results show that the average recognition rate of the player class was 96.1%.