Neuroevolution of content layout in the PCG Angry Bots video game

This paper demonstrates an approach to arranging content within maps of an action-shooter game. Content here refers to any virtual entity that a player will interact with during game-play, including enemies and pick-ups. The content layout for a map is indirectly represented by a Compositional Pattern-Producing Networks (CPPN), which are evolved through the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm. This representation is utilized within a complete procedural map generation system in the game PCG: Angry Bots. In this game, after a player has experienced a map, a recommender system is used to capture their feedback and construct a player model to evaluate future generations of CPPNs. The result is a content layout scheme that is optimized to the preferences and skill of an individual player. We provide a series of case studies that demonstrate the system as it is being used by various types of players.

Author: 
William L. Raffe
Fabio Zambetta
Xiaodong Li
Presented At: 
Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2013 IEEE Congress on, pp. 673-680
Year: 
2013
Type: 
Conference Proceedings