Runtime Evaluation of Procedural Content Generation in an Endless Runner Game Using Autonomous Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces Momentum, an endless-runner game that unifies procedural content generation and autonomous runtime evaluation, ensuring balanced and playable generated environments through integrated agents and validation mechanisms.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated runtime evaluation framework for PCG in games, combining generation, validation, and performance measurement within a single gameplay loop.

Findings

Autonomous agents effectively identify problematic generated scenarios.

Unified generation and validation improve runtime performance and content quality.

Quantitative evaluation framework for PCG axes like playability and diversity.

Abstract

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) enables game content to be created algorithmically without direct manual level-design effort, but it introduces a serious evaluation problem: generated content may become unbalanced, blocked, repetitive, or technically unsolvable. This paper presents Momentum, an endless-runner game that integrates runtime terrain generation, environment object spawning, and autonomous agent-based evaluation into a single gameplay loop. Ground tiles and environmental objects are generated dynamically as the player advances, object placement follows a constraint-driven mechanism inspired by Wave Function Collapse (WFC), and the runtime navigation surface is rebuilt asynchronously to remain consistent with the streamed environment. Two autonomous evaluation agents move ahead of the player and inspect the generated path: an aerial scanner that examines the corridor geometrically, and a ground-traversal agent that validates the same region from a navigational perspective. The evaluation pipeline combines ray casting, volumetric physics sweeps, obstacle-layer filtering, and structured crash reporting to identify problematic generated scenarios before they reach the player. The work demonstrates how generation and validation can be unified within the same runtime loop, rather than treating evaluation as a separate offline pass. Around this implementation, the paper formulates a measurable evaluation framework along the canonical PCG axes of playability, diversity, controllability, and runtime performance, derives a structural saturation bound on the spawner from its own placement constraints, and quantifies the per-segment scanning cost of the agents from first principles.