AI-assisted analysis of player strategy across level progressions in a puzzle game

Britton Horn, Amy K. Hoover, Yetunde Folajimi, Jackie Barnes, Casper Harteveld, Gillian Smith

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Presenting levels commensurate with players' current understanding of game mechanics and level design is a significant challenge in designing games. Often game designers create levels by hand intending for the levels to increase in difficulty over the course of the game while relying on their intuition or extensive user feedback, reiteration, and testing. Instead, this study starts from a number of procedurally generated levels originally generated by parameters expected to encourage a good difficulty progression and then presented to players during play tests. A number of AI-bots with different characteristics were then designed to assess the difficulty of each level. These findings are then compared with player data. Our findings show that bots encapsulating idealized player strategies can help us create a richer model of level difficulty that then reveals useful information about player struggles and learning across level progressions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2017
EditorsAlessandro Canossa, Miguel Sicart, Casper Harteveld, Jichen Zhu, Sebastian Deterding
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9781450353199
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 14 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2017 - Cape Cod, United States
Duration: Aug 14 2017Aug 17 2017

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series
VolumePart F130151

Other

Other12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityCape Cod
Period8/14/178/17/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

Keywords

  • AI-assistance
  • Level progression
  • Player strategy
  • Puzzle game

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