Arda: a Framework for Procedural Video Game Content Generation

The current trend in computer game design is toward larger and richer virtual worlds, providing interesting and abundant game content for players to explore. The creation and continuous expansion of detailed virtual environments, however, is a time and resource-consuming task for game developers. Procedural content generation potentially solves this problem; textures, landscapes, and more recently the creation of entire cities and their constituent roads and buildings can be performed in an automated fashion, potentially offering considerable resource savings for developers. This thesis develops a comprehensive system for content generation, centering on a hierarchical world design. The Arda tool is presented as a modular system for supporting automatic content generation in a game context. Arda is composed of a framework for internally managing environmental data and content-generation algorithms, in addition to a graphical tool providing a simplified interface for generating video game content. The tool supports extensive customization, which is demonstrated through a novel algorithm for efficient and realistic city (road-plan) generation. Experimental results show the design is practical, producing qualitatively realistic results. It is also quite fast; large city plans, extending to the size of major real-world cities can be generated in a few seconds. The Arda design demonstrates the feasibility of automatic content generation, providing a practical and flexible system for quick prototyping, development and testing of game assets.