The process of play testing a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a play-testing approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers. Rather than have agents interacting with an actual game client, this approach recreates the bare bone mechanics of the game as a separate system. Our agent is able to play in minutes what would take testers days of organic gameplay. The analysis of thousands of game simulations exposed imbalances in game actions, identified inconsequential rewards and evaluated the effectiveness of optional strategic choices. Our test case game, The Sims Mobile, was recently released and the findings shown here influenced design changes that resulted in improved player experience.

Games have benchmarked AI methods since of a single game, discovering a few new variations on the inception of the field, with classic board games such existing research topics. The set of · Deckbuilding · Gameplaying · Player Modeling AI problems associated with video games has in recent decades expanded from simply playing games to win, to playing games in particular styles, generating game content, 1 Introduction modeling players etc. Different games pose very different challenges for AI systems, and several different For decades classic board games such as Chess, Checkers, AI challenges can typically be posed by the same and Go have dominated the landscape of AI and game. In this article we analyze the popular collectible games research. Often called the "drosophila of AI" in card game Hearthstone (Blizzard 2014) and describe reference to the drosophila fly's significance in biological a varied set of interesting AI challenges posed by this research, Chess in particular has been the subject game. Collectible card games are relatively understudied of hundreds of academic papers and decades of research in the AI community, despite their popularity and [18]. At the core of many of these approaches is designing the interesting challenges they pose. Analyzing a single algorithms to beat top human players. However, game in-depth in the manner we do here allows us to despite IBM's Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov in see the entire field of AI and Games through the lens the 1997 World Chess Championships and DeepMind's AlphaGo defeating Lee Sedol in the 2016 Google Deep-Mind Challenge Match [47], such programs have yet While there is value in designing algorithms to win (e.g.

The process of playtesting a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a playtesting approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers. Rather than have agents interacting with an actual game client, this approach recreates the bare bone mechanics of the game as a separate system. Our agent is able to play in minutes what would take testers days of organic gameplay. The analysis of thousands of game simulations exposed imbalances in game actions, identified inconsequential rewards and evaluated the effectiveness of optional strategic choices. Our test case game, The Sims Mobile, was recently released and the findings shown here influenced design changes that resulted in improved player experience.