Sentient World: Human-Based Procedural Cartography An Experiment in Interative Sketching and Iterative Refining

This paper presents a first step towards a mixed-initiative tool for the creation of game maps. The tool, named Sentient World, allows the designer to draw a rough terrain sketch, adding extra levels of detail through stochastic and gradient search. Novelty search generates a number of dissimilar artificial neural networks that are trained to approximate a designer’s sketch and provide maps of higher resolution back to the designer. As the procedurally generated maps are presented to the designer (to accept, reject, or edit) the terrain sketches are iteratively refined into complete high resolution maps which may diverge from initial designer concepts. The tool supports designer creativity while conforming to designer intentions, and maintains constant designer control through the map selection and map editing options. Results obtained on a number of test maps show that novelty search is beneficial for introducing divergent content to the designer without reducing the speed of iterative map refinement.