The Road Less Travelled: Trying And Failing To Generate Walking Simulators

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenges and failures in developing automated design systems for 3D walking simulators, highlighting the complexity of creating immersive spatial experiences in game design.

Contribution

It provides a detailed account of attempts to automate 3D game design focused on atmosphere and experience, and discusses reasons for their failure and future directions.

Findings

Automated systems struggled with spatial and atmospheric complexity.

Previous approaches were limited to goal-oriented 2D games.

Future work should focus on understanding immersive experience creation.

Abstract

Automated game design is a rapidly growing area of research, yet many aspects of game design lie largely unexamined still, as most systems focus on two-dimensional games with clear objectives and goal-oriented gameplay. This paper describes several attempts to build an automated game designer for 3D games more focused on space, atmosphere and experience. We describe our attempts to build these systems, why they failed, and what steps and future work we believe would be useful for future attempts by others.