Proceedings of the Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Towards a Generic Method of Evaluating Game Levels Antonios Liapis1, Georgios N. Yannakakis1,2, Julian Togelius1 1: Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark 2: Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, Msida, Malta Mail:
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[email protected] Abstract unseen games with minimal adjustments, evaluation func- tions with some degree of generality need to be devised. This This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the qual- paper contends that the best way to achieve this is to ab- ity of game levels across different games and even gen- stract away from game-specific features towards more high- res, which is of key importance for making procedural level concepts, while retaining applicability to a particular content generation and assisted game design tools more generally applicable. Three game design patterns are game. Fortunately, game design literature contains a number identified for having high generality while being easily of qualitative concepts which we can build on to construct quantifiable: area control, exploration and balance. For- relevant quantitative measures. mulas for measuring the extent to which a level includes This paper introduces a method for evaluating game lev- these concepts are proposed, and evaluation functions els consisting of six formulas evaluating area control, explo- are derived for levels in two different game genres: mul- ration and balance. These formulas, inspired by game de- tiplayer strategy game maps and single-player roguelike sign patterns, are quite generic and can be applied to a broad dungeons.