Enhancing Level Difficulty and Additional Content in Platform Videogames through Graph Analysis

In this article we present a system that enhances content in platform game levels. This is achieved by adding particular gaming entities and adjusting their arrangement, causing consequent changes in the inherent difficulty and in path related aspects. This idea follows our prior work for the automatic creation of level environments. Starting with a primal level structure and a corresponding graph that sketches the user path, the system detects mandatory and optional path sections and adapts them in order to create more elaborate challenges to the user, forcing detours to gather specific objects or trigger certain events. Alternatively, a designer can create that base level structure and use the algorithm to adapt it to a certain profile. Also, some adjustments can be made to enhance multiplayer cooperative gaming for uneven skilled players, where the path is adapted to force a difficult route to one player and an easier one for the other player. Our experiments showed interesting results on some popular games, where it is possible to observe the previous principles put into practise. The approach is generic and can be expanded to other similar games.