Optimal cover placement against static enemy positions

With the popularity of first-person shooter (FPS) games and roleplaying games (RPG), procedurally generated levels are a growing topic of interest in games research. Level design for FPS games aimed at presenting interesting gameplay, involves map generation as well as object and resource placement. Existing techniques mainly focus on map generation. The placement of objects or debris, in which a player can take momentary cover, as well as the locations of hardened enemy positions, greatly impacts the gameplay and the strategy a player may take towards progressing through the game. We propose the damage function to encode the flux of damage at every point in space throughout the level. We work under the premise that there exists a path that is optimal in some sense through this damage field (i.e., there exists a path that would inflict the least amount of damage on the player). We describe how to create a damage function under several use cases and compute this optimal path. Every configuration of enemy locations and cover elements potentially creates a different damage function and hence a different optimal path. We examine various metrics that may be used to compare one configuration to another. Using this framework we are able to search for optimal covers under various metrics.