The Quest for Content: A Survey of Search-Based Procedural Content Generation for Video Games

TL;DR

This survey reviews Search-Based Procedural Content Generation (SBPCG) in video games from 2011-2022, highlighting its methods, challenges, and future research directions to address the increasing demand for game content.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SBPCG techniques, identifies open challenges, and offers recommendations and future research directions for the field.

Findings

SBPCG has evolved significantly from 2011 to 2022.

Key challenges include scalability and content quality.

Future research should focus on automation and hybrid approaches.

Abstract

Video games demand is constantly increasing, which requires the costly production of large amounts of content. Towards this challenge, researchers have developed Search-Based Procedural Content Generation (SBPCG), that is, the (semi-)automated creation of content through search algorithms. We survey the current state of SBPCG, reporting work appeared in the field between 2011-2022 and identifying open research challenges. The results lead to recommendations for practitioners and to the identification of several potential future research avenues for SBPCG.