Abstract
Iterative design is an expensive yet necessary task in the creation of coherent game levels. However, it often requires many resources, something that many projects, especially in the academic field, are usually lacking. This paper discusses the results of a test performed on EscapeTower, a pre-existing customer-ready research game where hand-crafted levels have been replaced by procedural ones to speed up the development process. A custom room generator has been developed and used to procedurally generate several levels for the EscapeTower project. A User Study was subsequently conducted to assess how the procedurally generated levels affect the user experience within the game and how they compared to the original levels designed by professionals. Results are in line with current literature, showing that players have a significant preference over manually designed spaces. However, data also shows that procedurally generated environments did not impact users’ ability to navigate the spaces, leading to the possibility to use such systems in early prototyping and designing phases.
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Galdieri, R., Longobardi, A., De Bonis, M., Carrozzino, M. (2021). Users’ Evaluation of Procedurally Generated Game Levels. In: De Paolis, L.T., Arpaia, P., Bourdot, P. (eds) Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics. AVR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12980. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87595-4_4
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