Automated redesign of local playspace properties

The design of games can be an unfortunately indirect endeavour: the designer’s objective may be to present the player with a particular set of possible experiences, or playspace, but what the designer actually creates (i.e. the game) is instead an artifact intended to produce the desired playspace only upon interaction. In this work we develop both a general framework and specific implementation for providing a designer a way to reason about and edit a game level’s playspace. Our system enables a designer to specify edits to playspace properties using a small set of local playspace edits and constraints. It then automatically (via optimization) produces a new level configuration that reflects the desired playspace changes. We present results from our system demonstrating the usefulness of our approach. This work constitutes an initial step toward a fully-realized playspace level design tool.