Co-creativity in Videogame Level Design

Motivation for this work comes from the belief that there is some untapped potential in having a computer work as a colleague with the videogame level designer as a source of creative stimulus,instead of simply being a tool, in order to achieve overall more creative results than those obtained from solo development. The proposed solution consists of a co-creative level design tool, focused on fostering creativity by allowing human and computer to work together in producing content using the Legend of Grimrock 2 Level Editor, exploring the digital “peer” paradigm. Its interface can be used by the designer to preview generated suggestions and orient its behavior. Suggestions are generated and iteratively evolved by two genetic algorithms and can be guided by the designer on different domains:innovation,objective and user map. Innovation seeks to generate content different from the designer’sl evel, objective seeks to generate content respecting specific layout guidelines and user map seeks to generate content strongly based on the designer’s level. Results showed this approach to be promising since it takes into account the smaller nuances of the co-creative interaction as a source of a positive influence. Outlined improvements such as a better way to support designer-specific patterns, selection context or on-demand suggestion generation helped set a direction for future work. We concluded that through an intuitive interface, flexible and adjustable behavior and an agile interaction process, we were able to provide some interesting contributions to the quality of the co-creative level design process.