A general-purpose expressive algorithm for room-based environments

Abstract

This paper presents a generative architecture for general-purpose room layouts that can be treated as geometric definitions of dungeons, mansions, shooter levels and more. The motivation behind this work is to provide a design tool for virtual environments that combines aspects of controllability, expressivity and generality. Towards that end, a two-tier level representation is realized, with a graph-based design specification constraining and guiding the generated geometries, facilitated by constrained evolutionary search. Expressivity is secured through quality-diversity search which can provide the designer with a broad variety of level layouts to choose from. Finally, the generator is general-purpose as it can produce layouts based on different types of static grid structures or as freeform, curved structures through an adaptive Voronoi diagram that is evolved along with the level itself. The method is tested on a variety of design specifications and grid types, and results show that even with complex design constraints or malleable grids the algorithm can produce a broad variety of levels.