Automated videogame mechanics generation with XVGDL

Abstract

The automatic generation of game mechanics is nowadays one of the most complex challenges within procedural content generation (PCG), even being considered by itself as automatic game generation in the literature. Previous works have contributed with research papers related to PCG in general, and, in particular, the generation of game mechanics from a specification written in a game description language (GDL). One primary reference is the Ludii general game system that allows to generate new mechanics for two-player combinatorial (board) games. Ludii manages game specifications written in a GDL that can be directly represented in a tree structure. These structures are then evolved by means of genetic programming (GP), a well-known bio-inspired optimization technique, to produce new game rules. Now, this paper extends the approach centered on 2-player games and proposed in the Ludii general game system to n-player videogames. The paper describes a system to automatically generate videogame mechanics. The starting point is a videogame specification written in the XML-based videogame description language (XVGDL). Similarly to Ludii, this videogame specification can be directly translated to rule tree structures that can be evolved by GP. The viability of this approach is demonstrated by experimentation with practical examples. The experiments show how it is possible to automatically produce and evaluate a number of distinct versions (that differ in their mechanics) of a videogame that was originally specified in XVGDL.