Checking the difficulty of evolutionary-generated maps in a N-body inspired mobile game

Abstract

This paper presents the design and development of an Android application (using Unreal Engine 4) called GravityVolve. It is a two-dimensions game based on the N-Body problem previously presented by some of the authors. In order to complete a map, the player will have to push the particle from its initial position until it reaches the circumference’s position. Thus, the maps of GravityVolve are made up of a particle, a circumference and a set of planets. These maps are procedurally generated by an evolutionary algorithm, and are assigned a difficulty level (‘Easy’, ‘Medium’, ‘Hard’). When a player completes a map, he/she will have access to a selection system where he/she will have to choose the level of difficulty he/she considers appropriate. So, the objectives of this study are two: first, to gather a considerable amount of votes from players with respect to their perception about the difficulty of every map; and two, to compare both, the user’s difficulty feeling and the difficulty given by the algorithm in order to check their correlation and reach some conclusions regarding the quality of the proposed method.