Aesthetic Considerations for Automated Platformer Design

We describe ANGELINA3, a system that can automatically develop games along a defined theme, by selecting appropriate multimedia content from a variety of sources and incorporating it into a game’s design. We discuss these capabilities in the context of the FACE model for assessing progress in the building of creative systems, and discuss how ANGELINA3 can be improved through further work. The design of videogames is both a technical and an aesthetic task, and a holistic approach is necessary when constructing systems which aim to automate the process. Systems previously demonstrated as automated game designers have been shown to tackle, in a basic way, many of the technical tasks associated with game design including level creation and ruleset design, for both simple arcade-style games (Cook and Colton 2011a) and platform games (Cook and Colton 2012). However, in such systems the art, sound and theme are chosen by a human. This weakens the claim that these systems automate the process of game design. Today, people play videogames for many reasons beyond simply the challenge they offer. Dan Pinchbeck’s experiment in narrative technique Dear Esther1 enjoyed 50,000 sales in its first week2, while Jenova Chen’s Flower3 has been used in a church in the UK as part of a service of worship, with one attendee describing the game as ‘spiritual’4. Automating the design of games that carry emotional weight or attempt to convey a complex meaning is a compelling research problem that lies at the intersection of game design theory and Computational Creativity, and is almost entirely unexplored.  We describe here a first step for the latest version of the software, ANGELINA3, towards producing a system that not only takes on the technical task of game and level design, but also independently selects and arranges visual and aural media as part of the deCopyright c 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. The Chinese Room, 2012 Dear Esther surpasses 50,000 sales http://bit.ly/esthsale http://thatgamecompany.com/games/flower, 2012 Cathedral uses game in church service http://bit.ly/flowcat sign process, to achieve a creative and artistic goal in the finished game. Our long term goal is to develop a fully automated creative videogame design system. This paper reports our progress towards this goal, in which we describe the third iteration of the ANGELINA3 system and employ the FACE model (Colton, Charnley, and Pease 2011) of evaluation from Computational Creativity to argue that ANGELINA3 is more creative than an earlier version of the software. We make the following contributions: 1. We describe an automated videogame design system, ANGELINA3, which is able to generate conceptual information gleaned from news articles, form aesthetic evaluations of a particular concept, invent example videogames which express these concepts, and generate its own framing information about its products and processes. 2. We demonstrate the use of evaluation criteria from Computational Creativity to game design systems, and use it to argue that our system has progressed in terms of creativity since a previously described version of the software. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: in the section titled Background we describe the structure of ANGELINA2 and extensions made in ANGELINA3; we then describe the modules that provide the system’s creative abilities; in the Example Games section we give examples of games produced by the system; we then evaluate ANGELINA3 as the system currently stands; in Related Work we outline some existing work in the area and its relation to ANGELINA3; finally we discuss future directions for the project to improve ANGELINA3’s creative abilities and independence as a designer.