GEEvo: Game Economy Generation and Balancing with Evolutionary Algorithms

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Rupp, Florian, Eckert, Kai
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Rupp, Florian
Eckert, Kai
author_facet Rupp, Florian
Eckert, Kai
contents Game economy design significantly shapes the player experience and progression speed. Modern game economies are becoming increasingly complex and can be very sensitive to even minor numerical adjustments, which may have an unexpected impact on the overall gaming experience. Consequently, thorough manual testing and fine-tuning during development are essential. Unlike existing works that address algorithmic balancing for specific games or genres, this work adopts a more abstract approach, focusing on game balancing through its economy, detached from a specific game. We propose GEEvo (Game Economy Evolution), a framework to generate graph-based game economies and balancing both, newly generated or existing economies. GEEvo uses a two-step approach where evolutionary algorithms are used to first generate an economy and then balance it based on specified objectives, such as generated resources or damage dealt over time. We define different objectives by differently parameterizing the fitness function using data from multiple simulation runs of the economy. To support this, we define a lightweight and flexible game economy simulation framework. Our method is tested and benchmarked with various balancing objectives on a generated dataset, and we conduct a case study evaluating damage balancing for two fictional economies of two popular game character classes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_18574
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GEEvo: Game Economy Generation and Balancing with Evolutionary Algorithms
Rupp, Florian
Eckert, Kai
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Game economy design significantly shapes the player experience and progression speed. Modern game economies are becoming increasingly complex and can be very sensitive to even minor numerical adjustments, which may have an unexpected impact on the overall gaming experience. Consequently, thorough manual testing and fine-tuning during development are essential. Unlike existing works that address algorithmic balancing for specific games or genres, this work adopts a more abstract approach, focusing on game balancing through its economy, detached from a specific game. We propose GEEvo (Game Economy Evolution), a framework to generate graph-based game economies and balancing both, newly generated or existing economies. GEEvo uses a two-step approach where evolutionary algorithms are used to first generate an economy and then balance it based on specified objectives, such as generated resources or damage dealt over time. We define different objectives by differently parameterizing the fitness function using data from multiple simulation runs of the economy. To support this, we define a lightweight and flexible game economy simulation framework. Our method is tested and benchmarked with various balancing objectives on a generated dataset, and we conduct a case study evaluating damage balancing for two fictional economies of two popular game character classes.
title GEEvo: Game Economy Generation and Balancing with Evolutionary Algorithms
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.18574