Mario Level Generation From Mechanics Using Scene Stitching

This paper presents a level generation method for Super Mario by stitching together pre-generated "scenes" that contain specific mechanics, using mechanic-sequences from agent playthroughs as input specifications. Given a sequence of mechanics, our system uses an FI-2Pop algorithm and a corpus of scenes to perform automated level authoring. The system outputs levels that have a similar mechanical sequence to the target mechanic sequence but with a different playthrough experience. We compare our system to a greedy method that selects scenes that maximize the target mechanics. Our system is able to maximize the number of matched mechanics while reducing emergent mechanics using the stitching process compared to the greedy approach.

Automated Playtesting of Matching Tile Games

Matching tile games are an extremely popular game genre. Arguably the most popular iteration, Match-3 games, are simple to understand puzzle games, making them great benchmarks for research. In this paper, we propose developing different procedural personas for Match-3 games in order to approximate different human playstyles to create an automated playtesting system. The procedural personas are realized through evolving the utility function for the Monte Carlo Tree Search agent. We compare the performance and results of the evolution agents with the standard Vanilla Monte Carlo Tree Search implementation as well as to a random move-selection agent. We then observe the impacts on both the game's design and the game design process. Lastly, a user study is performed to compare the agents to human play traces.