Game-Mechanics Reasoning for Automated Design Support

Videogame design fundamentally involves engineering interactive rule systems: a game designer combines a set of game mechanics such that, when they interact with each other and with the player’s actions, they produce the desired gameplay. Game designers typically prototype these rule systems to understand how they operate. Prototypes range from paper versions, in which a stripped-down form of the game’s rule system is simulated manually, to playable, implemented versions, which can be played by the designer and others to get feedback on gameplay ideas or discover problems. This thesis proposes that a number of the design questions such prototypes try to answer can be answered automatically. The ultimate design questions are mainly subjective: is the game interesting, fun, challenging, balanced, etc.? However, much prototyping gets at these issues indirectly by asking objective questions that help the designer understand how their rule system operates; the objective kinds of questions are amenable to automated reasoning, since they have answers that depend solely on the game’s formal rule system. By answering them automatically, we can speed up the design loop by allowing designers to quickly understand how their rule system is operating, getting much more factual understanding of the system that they can use in their subjective design thinking.