research-article

Tanagra: a mixed-initiative level design tool

Authors:

Michael MateasAuthors Info & Claims

FDG '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

Pages 209 - 216

https://doi.org/10.1145/1822348.1822376

Published: 19 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Tanagra is a prototype mixed-initiative design tool for 2D platformer level design, in which a human and computer can work together to produce a level. The human designer can place constraints on a continuously running level generator, in the form of exact geometry placement and manipulation of the level's pacing. The computer then fills in the rest of the level with geometry that guarantees playability, or informs the designer that there is no level that meets their requirements. This paper presents the design of Tanagra, a discussion of the editing operations it provides to the designer, and an evaluation of the expressivity of its generator.

References

[1]

Bay 12 Games. 2006. Dwarf Fortress (PC Game).

[2]

Booth, M. 2009. The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead. Keynote, Fifth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '09). Stanford, CA. October 14--16, 2009.

[3]

Byrne, E. 2005. Game Level Design. Charles River Media.

[4]

Castillo, T. and Novak, J. 2008. Game Development Essentials: Game Level Design. Delmar Cengage Learning.

Digital Library

[5]

Choco Team. 2008. Choco: an Open Source Java Constraint Programming Library. White Paper, CPAI08 Competition. http://www.emn.fr/zinfo/choco-solver/pdf/choco-presentation.pdf

[6]

Compton, K. and Mateas, M. 2006. Procedural Level Design for Platform Games. In Proceedings of the Second Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '06). Stanford, CA. 2006.

[7]

Firaxis Games. 2005. Sid Meier's Civilization IV (PC Game).

[8]

Hastings, E., Guha, R., and Stanley, K. O. 2009. Evolving Content in the Galactic Arms Race Video Game. In Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG '09). Milano, Italy. September 7--10, 2009.

Digital Library

[9]

Hullett, K. and Mateas, M. 2009. Scenario Generation for Emergency Rescue Training Games. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. Orlando, FL. April 26--30, 2009.

Digital Library

[10]

Hunicke, R. and Chapman, V. 2004. AI for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games. Papers from the 2004 AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game Artificial Intelligence. Technical Report WS-04-04, The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, CA.

[11]

Isla, D. 2009. Invited Talk: Next-Gen Content Creation for Next-Gen AI. Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Orlando, FL. April 26--30, 2009.

Digital Library

[12]

Lawson, B. and Loke, S. M. 1997. Computers, Words, and Pictures. Design Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 171--183. 1997.

[13]

Lipp, M., Wonka, P., and Wimmer, M. 2008. Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture. In Proc. of the Intl. Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '08). Los Angeles, CA. August 11--15, 2008.

Digital Library

[14]

Lubart, T. 2005. How Can Computers be Partners in the Creative Process: Classification and Commentary on the Special Issue. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, vol. 63, no. 4--5, pp. 365--369, 2005.

Digital Library

[15]

Mateas, M. and Stern, A. 2002. A Behavior Language for Story-Based Believable Agents. IEEE Intelligent Systems, pp. 39--47. July/August, 2002.

Digital Library

[16]

Negroponte, N. 2003. Soft Architecture Machines. In The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, Eds. Chapter 23, pp. 353--366. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 2003.

[17]

Nitsche, M., Ashmore, C., Hankinson, W., Fitzpatrick, R., Kelly, J., and Margenau, K. 2006. Designing Procedural Game Spaces: A Case Study. In Proceedings of FuturePlay 2006. London, Ontario. October 10--12, 2006.

[18]

Pedersen, C., Togelius, T., and Yannakakis, G. 2009. Modeling Player Experience in Super Mario Bros. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG '09). Milano, Italy. September 7--10, 2009.

Digital Library

[19]

Persson, Marcus. 2008. Infinite Mario Bros! (Online Game). Last Accessed: December 2008. http://www.mojang.com/notch/mario

[20]

Regier, J. and Gresko, R. 2009. "Random Asset Generation in Diablo 3", Invited Talk, UC Santa Cruz. October 30, 2009.

[21]

Resnick, M. et al. 2005. Design Principles for Tools to Support Creative Thinking. Technical Report: NSF Workshop Report on Creativity Support Tools. Washington, DC. 2005.

[22]

Rogue Basin. Articles on Implementation Techniques {Online}. Last Accessed: July 2009. http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Articles#Implementation

[23]

Satchell, C. 2009. Keynote: Evolution of the Medium - Positioning for the Future of Gaming. Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Orlando, FL. April 26--30, 2009.

Digital Library

[24]

Smith, A. M., Nelson, M. J., and Mateas, M. 2009. Prototyping Games with BIPED. In Proceedings of the Fifth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '09). Stanford, CA. October 14--16, 2009.

[25]

Smith, G., Cha, M., and Whitehead, J. 2008. A Framework for Analysis of 2D Platformer Levels. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium 2008. Los Angeles, CA. August 9--10, 2008.

Digital Library

[26]

Smith, G., Treanor, M., Whitehead, J., and Mateas, M. 2009. Rhythm-based Level Generation for 2D Platformers. In Proc. of the 4th Int'l Conference on Foundations of Digital Games. Orlando, FL. April 26--30, 2009.

Digital Library

[27]

Sternberg, Robert J. 1999. Enhancing Creativity, Handbook of Creativity. pp 401--402. Cambridge University Press.

[28]

Sullivan, A., Mateas, M., and Wardrip-Fruin, N. 2009. QuestBrowser: Making Quests Playable with Computer-Assisted Design. In Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture 2009 (DAC '09). Irvine, CA. December 12--15, 2009.

[29]

Togelius, J., De Nardi, R., and Lucas, S. 2007. Towards Automatic Personalised Content Creation for Racing Games. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG '09). Honolulu, HI. 2007.

[30]

Tutenel, T, Smelik, R., Bidarra, R., and Jan De Kraker, K. 2009. Using Semantics to Improve the Design of Game Worlds. In Proceedings of the Fifth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE '09). Stanford, CA. October 14--16, 2009.

[31]

Yu, D. 2009. Spelunky (PC Game).

Cited By

Kanervisto ABignell DWen LGrayson MGeorgescu RValcarcel Macua STan SRashid TPearce TCao YLemkhenter AJiang CCostello GGupta GTot MIshida SGupta TArora UWhite RDevlin SMorrison CHofmann K(2025)World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideationNature10.1038/s41586-025-08600-3638:8051(656-663)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08600-3
Moruzzi CMargarido S(2024)A User-centered Framework for Human-AI Co-creativityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650929(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650929
Charity MDave IKhalifa ATogelius J(2024)Baba is Y'all 2.0: Design and Investigation of a Collaborative Mixed-Initiative SystemIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.322352716:1(75-89)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TG.2022.3223527
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

The Q*bird Level Designer: User-assisted procedural level design in augmented reality
MIG '19: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games

Augmented reality (AR) gaming is becoming widely available thanks to improvements in hand-held devices such as phones and tablets. In this work, we describe our system for generating levels for the AR game, Q*bird. In Q*bird, the player must visit every ...
Polymorph: dynamic difficulty adjustment through level generation
PCGames '10: Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games

Players begin games at different skill levels and develop their skill at different rates so that even the best-designed games are uninterestingly easy for some players and frustratingly difficult for others. A proposed answer to this challenge is ...
A mixed-initiative tool for designing level progressions in games
UIST '13: Proceedings of the 26th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Creating game content requires balancing design considerations at multiple scales: each level requires effort and iteration to produce, and broad-scale constraints such as the order in which game concepts are introduced must be respected. Game designers ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

FDG '10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

June 2010

306 pages

ISBN:9781605589374

DOI:10.1145/1822348

Conference Chair:
Ian Horswill
Northwestern University
,
Program Chair:
Yusuf Pisan
University of Technology, Sydney

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Microsoft: Microsoft
SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Study of Digital Games

In-Cooperation

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 June 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

FDG '10

Sponsor:

Microsoft
SASDG

FDG '10: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

June 19 - 21, 2010

California, Monterey

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

78
Total Citations
View Citations
925
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)102
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kanervisto ABignell DWen LGrayson MGeorgescu RValcarcel Macua STan SRashid TPearce TCao YLemkhenter AJiang CCostello GGupta GTot MIshida SGupta TArora UWhite RDevlin SMorrison CHofmann K(2025)World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideationNature10.1038/s41586-025-08600-3638:8051(656-663)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08600-3
Moruzzi CMargarido S(2024)A User-centered Framework for Human-AI Co-creativityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650929(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650929
Charity MDave IKhalifa ATogelius J(2024)Baba is Y'all 2.0: Design and Investigation of a Collaborative Mixed-Initiative SystemIEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.322352716:1(75-89)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TG.2022.3223527
Ram MJadhav AReddy VTripathy AKancharla KPuppala R(2024)Procedural Content Generation for Racing Games2024 International Conference on Signal Processing, Computation, Electronics, Power and Telecommunication (IConSCEPT)10.1109/IConSCEPT61884.2024.10627796(1-4)Online publication date: 4-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IConSCEPT61884.2024.10627796
Wang YLuo JGaier AAtherton EKoch H(2024)PlotMap: Automated Layout Design for Building Game Worlds2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG60054.2024.10645627(1-8)Online publication date: 5-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG60054.2024.10645627
Villareale JMaram SSeif El-Nasr MZhu J(2023)Integrating Players’ Perspectives in AI-Based Games: Case Studies of Player-AI Interaction DesignProceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3582437.3582451(1-9)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582437.3582451
Rezwana JMaher M(2023)Designing Creative AI Partners with COFI: A Framework for Modeling Interaction in Human-AI Co-Creative SystemsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/351902630:5(1-28)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3519026
Cooper SGuzdial M(2023)path2level: Constraint-Based Level Generation from Paths2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333205(1-4)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333205
Langendam TBidarra R(2022)miWFC - Designer Empowerment through mixed-initiative Wave Function CollapseProceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3555858.3563266(1-8)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555858.3563266
Volkmar GAlexandrovsky DEilks AQueck DHerrlich MMalaka R(2022)Effects of PCG on Creativity in Playful City-Building Environments in VRProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35494936:CHI PLAY(1-20)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3549493
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten