Jonathan Tremblay

An algorithmic approach to analyzing combat and stealth games

Combat and stealth games give players the option of engaging or avoiding enemy agents at different points. Level-design in this context is complex, however, requiring a designer to understand how different design choices impact difficulty under multiple play-styles. In this work we describe a unified algorithmic approach that can perform abstract analysis of both combat and stealth behaviours. Our proposed solution builds on an existing stealth-level analysis tool, incorporating combat activities into the abstraction in order to allow exploration of level feasibility and difficulty. We demonstrate our approach on a non-trivial example level, showing how such a tool can be used to evaluate and control the player experience.

A game genre agnostic framework for game-design

Designing games can involve long waiting periods between design phases in order to get feedback from game testers playing the game. In this work we propose a genre agnostic framework for design, using search techniques from artificial intelligence to generate player traces. We evaluate our framework by presenting three very different games that are sent to the tool and which give relevant design information. This approach greatly accelerates the design process.

Towards the design of a human-like FPS NPC using pheromone maps

Non-player characters (NPCs) in video games tend to be easily recognized by human players, reducing the sense of immersion and limiting the complexity of character interactions. In this paper we study various aspects of the NPCs performance and how it differs from human players. We provide categorization and metrics for quantifying some aspects of the NPCs performance and provide an in-depth analysis of the behavior of NPCs. We detail how movements, interactions, use of items, and relying on static decision-making schemes result in markedly different behaviors from humans in the popular FPS Quake III. In addition, we propose a framework relying on a special kind of influence map, a pheromone map, which can lead to a more adaptive human-like behavior. These maps can efficiently give a summary of the events in the game world, be adaptive in nature, and be effectively used in the decision making process of NPCs.