An approach to level design using procedural content generation and difficulty curves

Abstract

Level design is an art which consists of creating the combination of challenge, competition, and interaction that players call fun and involves a careful and deliberate development of the game space. When working with procedural content generation, it is necessary to review how the game designer sets the change in difficulty throughout the different levels. In this paper we present a procedural level generator that can be used for different games and is based on a genetic algorithm. We define a fitness function that does not depend on the game or content type. This function calculates the difference between the difficulty curve defined by the designer and the difficulty curve calculated for the candidate content, so the best content is the one whose difficulty curve best fits the desired curve. To design our generator, we rely on the concept of flow, theories of fun and game design.