Exploring the Visual Styles of Arcade Game Assets

• Published in: Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design Vol. 9596; pp. 92 - 109
• Main Author: Liapis, Antonios
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2016; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Algorithms & data structures; Artificial intelligence; Game Level; Infeasible Individual; Novelty Search; User interface design & usability; Visual Property; Visual Quality
• ISBN: 9783319310077; 3319310070
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31008-4_7

This paper describes a method for evolving assets for video games based on their visuals properties. Focusing on assets for a space shooter game, a genotype consisting of turtle commands is transformed into a spaceship image composed of human-authored sprite components. Due to constraints on the final spaceships’ plausibility, the paper investigates two-population constrained optimization and constrained novelty search methods. A sample of visual styles is tested, each a combination of visual metrics which primarily evaluate balance and shape complexity. Experiments with constrained optimization of a visual style demonstrate that a visually consistent set of spaceships can be generated, while experiments with constrained novelty search demonstrate that several distinct visual styles can be discovered by exploring along select, or all, visual dimensions.