Sentient Sketchbook: Computer-Assisted Game Level Authoring

This paper introduces Sentient Sketchbook, a tool which supports a designer in the creation of game levels. Using map sketches to alleviate designer effort, the tool automates playability checks and evaluations and visualizes significant gameplay properties. Most importantly, this paper introduces constrained novelty search via a two-population paradigm for generating, in real-time, alternatives to the author’s design and evaluates its potential against current approaches. The paper concludes with a small-scale user survey during which industry experts interact with Sentient Sketchbook to design game levels. Results demonstrate the tool’s potential and provide directions for its improvement.