Supporting Pre-Production in Game Development : Process Mapping and Principles for a Procedural Prototyping Tool

Abstract: Game development involves both traditional software activities combined with creative work. As a result, game design practices are characterized by an extensive process of iterative development and evaluation, where prototyping is a major component to test and evaluate the player experience. Content creation for the virtual world the players inhabit is one of the most time-consuming aspects of production. This experimental research study focuses on analyzing and formulating challenges and desired properties in a prototyping tool based on Procedural Content Generation to assist game designers in their early ideation process. To investigate this, a proof of concept was iteratively developed based on information gathered from interviews and evaluations with world designers during a conceptual and design study. The final user study assessed the tool’s functionalities and indicated its potential utility in enhancing the designers’ content exploration and risk management during pre-production activities. Key guidelines for the tool’s architecture can be distilled into: (1) A modular design approach supports balance between content controllability and creativity. (2) Design levels and feature representation should combine and range between Micro (specific) to Macro (high-level, abstract). The result revealed challenges in combining exploration of the design space with optimization and refinement of content. However, the thesis specifically concentrated on one specific type of content - city generation, to represent world design content generation. To fully understand the generalizable aspects different types of game content would need to be covered in further research.