Measuring quality of grammars for procedural level generation

Riemer van Rozen, Quinten Heijn

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Abstract

Grammar-based procedural level generation raises the productivity of level designers for games such as dungeon crawl and platform games. However, the improved productivity comes at cost of level quality assurance. Authoring, improving and maintaining grammars is difficult because it is hard to predict how each grammar rule impacts the overall level quality, and tool support is lacking. We propose a novel metric called Metric of Added Detail (MAD) that indicates if a rule adds or removes detail with respect to its phase in the transformation pipeline, and Specification Analysis Reporting (SAnR) for expressing level properties and analyzing how qualities evolve in level generation histories. We demonstrate MAD and SAnR using a prototype of a level generator called Ludoscope Lite. Our preliminary results show that problematic rules tend to break SAnR properties and that MAD intuitively raises flags. MAD and SAnR augment existing approaches, and can ultimately help designers make better levels and level generators.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFDG '18
Subtitle of host publicationproceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
EditorsSteve Dahlskog, Sebastian Deterding, Jose M. Font, Mitu Khandaker, Carl Magnus Olsson, Sebastian Risi, Christoph Salge
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781450365710
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2018
EventInternational Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games - Malmö, Sweden
Duration: 7 Aug 201810 Aug 2018

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
Abbreviated titleFDG
Country/TerritorySweden
CityMalmö
Period7/08/1810/08/18

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