A Controllable Co-Creative Agent for Game System Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible, controllable co-creative system for game system design that models games abstractly, enabling collaboration across various genres and supporting human designers.

Contribution

It presents a novel abstract game modeling approach using state-machine components and resource flows, along with a controllable evaluation and generation system for co-creative game design.

Findings

System can express a wide range of game types

System is human-controllable for co-creative applications

Effective in collaborative game system design

Abstract

Many advancements have been made in procedural content generation for games, and with mixed-initiative co-creativity, have the potential for great benefits to human designers. However, co-creative systems for game generation are typically limited to specific genres, rules, or games, limiting the creativity of the designer. We seek to model games abstractly enough to apply to any genre, focusing on designing game systems and mechanics, and create a controllable, co-creative agent that can collaborate on these designs. We present a model of games using state-machine-like components and resource flows, a set of controllable metrics, a design evaluator simulating playthroughs with these metrics, and an evolutionary design balancer and generator. We find this system to be both able to express a wide range of games and able to be human-controllable for future co-creative applications.