# General Video Game Rule Generation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces the General Video Game Rule Generation framework, a new approach to automatically create game rules from levels, enabling more manageable game development and advancing AI research in game design.

## Contribution

It presents a novel framework and three rule generation methods for creating game rules from levels, addressing the inverse problem of level generation in video games.

## Key findings

- Constructive generator produces playable, interesting rules but limited in diversity.
- Search-based generator creates diverse rulesets with variable quality.
- Framework facilitates new research avenues in automated game design.

## Abstract

We introduce the General Video Game Rule Generation problem, and the eponymous software framework which will be used in a new track of the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition. The problem is, given a game level as input, to generate the rules of a game that fits that level. This can be seen as the inverse of the General Video Game Level Generation problem. Conceptualizing these two problems as separate helps breaking the very hard problem of generating complete games into smaller, more manageable subproblems. The proposed framework builds on the GVGAI software and thus asks the rule generator for rules defined in the Video Game Description Language. We describe the API, and three different rule generators: a random, a constructive and a search-based generator. Early results indicate that the constructive generator generates playable and somewhat interesting game rules but has a limited expressive range, whereas the search-based generator generates remarkably diverse rulesets, but with an uneven quality.