skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Two-step Constructive Approaches for Dungeon Generation
This paper presents a two-step generative approach for creating dungeons in the rogue-like puzzle game MiniDungeons 2. Gener- ation is split into two steps, initially producing the architectural layout of the level as its walls and floor tiles, and then furnishing it with game objects representing the player’s start and goal position, challenges and rewards. Three layout creators and three furnishers are introduced in this paper, which can be combined in different ways in the two-step generative process for producing diverse dun- geons levels. Layout creators generate the floors and walls of a level, while furnishers populate it with monsters, traps, and treasures. We test the generated levels on several expressivity measures, and in simulations with procedural persona agents.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1717324
PAR ID:
10132615
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
FDG Workshop on Procedural Content Generation
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. An increasing number of game platforms, such as Roblox, enable game creators to develop user-generated games (UGGs). Yet, these platforms often come under scrutiny for hosting UGGs that contain harmful content, ranging from sexually explicit material to Nazi-themed roleplay. Limited attention has been paid to how harmful UGGs are ideated by game creators. To address this question, we studied an online Roblox creator community, where Roblox creators collectively engage in design ideation to brainstorm design ideas for UGGs. Through an inductive thematic analysis, we found three primary ways where Roblox creators' design ideation becomes risky, including how Roblox creators generate risky game design ideas, navigate through policy boundaries to develop these ideas, and share strategies of bypassing moderation. Based on our findings, we discuss ethical and governance challenges facing user-generated games. We propose design implications to support game creators in developing ethical game design ideas and safe game designs. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown impressive results for image generation. However, GANs face challenges in generating contents with certain types of constraints, such as game levels. Specifically, it is difficult to generate levels that have aesthetic appeal and are playable at the same time. Additionally, because training data usually is limited, it is challenging to generate unique levels with current GANs. In this paper, we propose a new GAN architecture named Conditional Embedding Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Net- work (CESAGAN) and a new bootstrapping training procedure. The CESAGAN is a modification of the self-attention GAN that incorporates an embedding feature vector input to condition the training of the discriminator and generator. This allows the network to model non-local dependency between game objects, and to count objects. Additionally, to reduce the number of levels necessary to train the GAN, we propose a bootstrapping mechanism in which playable generated levels are added to the training set. The results demonstrate that the new approach does not only generate a larger number of levels that are playable but also generates fewer duplicate levels compared to a standard GAN. 
    more » « less
  3. The Snowdrift Game, also known as the Hawk-Dove Game, is a social dilemma in which an individual can participate (cooperate) or not (defect) in producing a public good. It is relevant to a number of collective action problems in biology. In a population of individuals playing this game, traditional evolutionary models, in which the dynamics are continuous and deterministic, predict a stable, interior equilibrium frequency of cooperators. Here, we examine how finite population size and multilevel selection affect the evolution of cooperation in this game using a two-level Moran process, which involves discrete, stochastic dynamics. Our analysis has two main results. First, we find that multilevel selection in this model can yield significantly higher levels of cooperation than one finds in traditional models. Second, we identify a threshold effect for the payoff matrix in the Snowdrift Game, such that below (above) a determinate cost-to-benefit ratio, cooperation will almost surely fix (go extinct) in the population. This second result calls into question the explanatory reach of traditional continuous models and suggests a possible alternative explanation for high levels of cooperative behavior in nature. 
    more » « less
  4. Offering products in the forms of menu bundles is a common practice in marketing to attract customers and maximize revenues. In crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, rewards also play an important part in influencing project success. Designing rewards consisting of the appropriate items is a challenging yet crucial task for the project creators. However, prior research has not considered the strategies project creators take to offer and bundle the rewards, making it hard to study the impact of reward designs on project success. In this paper, we raise a novel research question: understanding project creators’ decisions of reward designs to level their chance to succeed. We approach this by modeling the design behavior of project creators, and identifying the behaviors that lead to project success. We propose a probabilistic generative model, Menu-Offering-Bundle (MOB) model, to capture the offering and bundling decisions of project creators based on collected data of 14K crowdfunding projects and their 149K reward bundles across a half-year period. Our proposed model is shown to capture the offering and bundling topics, outperform the baselines in predicting reward designs.We also find that the learned offering and bundling topics carry distinguishable meanings and provide insights of key factors on project success. 
    more » « less
  5. Despite remarkable recent progress on both unconditional and conditional image synthesis, it remains a long-standing problem to learn generative models that are capable of synthesizing realistic and sharp images from reconfigurable spatial layout (i.e., bounding boxes + class labels in an image lattice) and style (i.e., structural and appearance variations encoded by latent vectors), especially at high resolution. By reconfigurable, it means that a model can preserve the intrinsic one-to-many mapping from a given layout to multiple plausible images with different styles, and is adaptive with respect to perturbations of a layout and style latent code. In this paper, we present a layout- and style-based architecture for generative adversarial networks (termed LostGANs) that can be trained end-to-end to generate images from reconfigurable layout and style. Inspired by the vanilla StyleGAN, the proposed LostGAN consists of two new components: (i) learning fine-grained mask maps in a weakly-supervised manner to bridge the gap between layouts and images, and (ii) learning object instance-specific layout-aware feature normalization (ISLA-Norm) in the generator to realize multi-object style generation. In experiments, the proposed method is tested on the COCO-Stuff dataset and the Visual Genome dataset with state-of-the-art performance obtained. The code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/iVMCL/LostGANs 
    more » « less