DEVELOPING A SPACE SYNTAX-BASED EVALUATION METHOD FOR PROCEDURALLY GENERATED GAME LEVELS

Abstract

Procedural content generation (PCG) has been an essential catalyzer in the last decade with its efficiency in creating game elements such as textures, game levels, and maps. Despite being successfully applied in various studies, new reliable evaluation tools are still needed to assess the quality of the generated game content. One example limitation of procedurally generated game worlds is the lacking spatial configuration. To address this issue, in this study, an assessment method was developed to evaluate the spatial quality of procedurally generated game worlds. For this purpose, Space Syntax was used, which incorporates a set of methods to analyze spatial configurations and movement. The analyses were applied to a new game developed by the authors —the Haunted House— and the performance was evaluated in terms of integration, connectivity, and depth distance. Results show that changing the room dimensions (i.e., 15x15, 25x25, and 35x35 units) modifies the performance measures as well as game design parameters —number of the spawning points (ranging from 1 to 4), critical axes (1 to 5), to name a few. The proposed approach is a first attempt to create various improved spatial configurations and provide an evaluation tool to analyze the PCG algorithms in level design.

Keywords

• Procedural Content Generation
• Space Partitioning Algorithm
• Space Syntax
• Spatial Analysis
• Video Games

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