15
May

ELIMINATION from Design to Analysis

This is a postmortem for our game ELIMINATION (you can try it here: http://akhalifa.com/elimination/ on Browser, Android, or iOS devices) talking about the different design decisions during creating the game and the level generator and validating some of these theories using players’ data. This post is an adapted version of our (Ahmed Khalifa, Dan Gopstein, and Julian Togeliuspaper that was submitted as a short paper for CoG conference.

Using procedural content generation (PCG) in games, especially for core game elements such as levels, is a bit of an art. When it is executed well, it enhances the player experience and keeps the player wanting to play again [1] but any mistake in the system and the game could feel boring, repetitive and might lead to disappointment [2]. Just like game design, PCG systems are designed using designers’ intuition and a trial and error process. Designers usually test the system on a group of players and based on the feedback they adjust the generator until it works as intended [3].