Automated playtesting of matching tile games

Luvneesh Mugrai, Fernando Silva, Christoffer Holmgard, Julian Togelius

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    Matching tile games are an extremely popular game genre. Arguably the most popular iteration, Match-3 games, are simple to understand puzzle games, making them great benchmarks for research. In this paper, we propose developing different procedural personas for Match-3 games in order to approximate different human playstyles to create an automated playtesting system. The procedural personas are realized through evolving the utility function for the Monte Carlo Tree Search agent. We compare the performance and results of the evolution agents with the standard Vanilla Monte Carlo Tree Search implementation as well as to a random move-selection agent. We then observe the impacts on both the game's design and the game design process. Lastly, a user study is performed to compare the agents to human play traces.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationIEEE Conference on Games 2019, CoG 2019
    PublisherIEEE Computer Society
    ISBN (Electronic)9781728118840
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Aug 2019
    Event2019 IEEE Conference on Games, CoG 2019 - London, United Kingdom
    Duration: Aug 20 2019Aug 23 2019

    Publication series

    NameIEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG
    Volume2019-August
    ISSN (Print)2325-4270
    ISSN (Electronic)2325-4289

    Conference

    Conference2019 IEEE Conference on Games, CoG 2019
    Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
    CityLondon
    Period8/20/198/23/19

    Keywords

    • Genetic Evolution
    • Match-3
    • Monte Carlo Tree Search
    • Procedural Personas

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Artificial Intelligence
    • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
    • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
    • Human-Computer Interaction
    • Software

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