Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques enable automatic creation of diverse and complex environments. While PCG facilitates more efficient content creation, ensuring consistently high-quality, industry-standard content remains a significant challenge. In this research, we propose a method to identify and repair unstable levels generated by existing PCG models. We use Angry Birds as a case study, demonstrating our method on game levels produced by established PCG approaches. Our method leverages object segmentation and visual analysis of level images to detect structural gaps and perform targeted repairs. We evaluate multiple object segmentation models and select the most effective one as the basis for our repair pipeline. Experimental results show that our method improves the stability and playability of AI-generated levels. Although our evaluation is specific to Angry Birds, our image-based approach is designed to be applicable to a wide range of 2D games with similar level structures.

Music transcription plays a pivotal role in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), particularly for stringed instruments like the guitar, where symbolic music notations such as MIDI lack crucial playability information. This contribution introduces the Fretting-Transformer, an encoderdecoder model that utilizes a T5 transformer architecture to automate the transcription of MIDI sequences into guitar tablature. By framing the task as a symbolic translation problem, the model addresses key challenges, including string-fret ambiguity and physical playability. The proposed system leverages diverse datasets, including DadaGP, GuitarToday, and Leduc, with novel data pre-processing and tokenization strategies. We have developed metrics for tablature accuracy and playability to quantitatively evaluate the performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the Fretting-Transformer surpasses baseline methods like A* and commercial applications like Guitar Pro. The integration of context-sensitive processing and tuning/capo conditioning further enhances the model's performance, laying a robust foundation for future developments in automated guitar transcription.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has advanced from textto-image generation to text-to-video and multimodal video synthesis. However, generating playable games presents significant challenges due to the stringent requirements for realtime interaction, high visual quality, and accurate simulation of game mechanics. Existing approaches often fall short, either lacking real-time capabilities or failing to accurately simulate interactive mechanics. To tackle the playability issue, we propose a novel method called PlayGen, which encompasses game data generation, an autoregressive DiT-based diffusion model, and a comprehensive playability-based evaluation framework. Validated on well-known 2D and 3D games, PlayGen achieves real-time interaction, ensures sufficient visual quality, and provides accurate interactive mechanics simulation. Notably, these results are sustained even after over 1000 frames of gameplay on an NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU. Our code is publicly available: here. Our playable demo generated by AI is: here.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their worth across a diverse spectrum of disciplines. LLMs have shown great potential in Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as well, but directly generating a level through a pre-trained LLM is still challenging. This work introduces Word2World, a system that enables LLMs to procedurally design playable games through stories, without any task-specific fine-tuning. Word2World leverages the abilities of LLMs to create diverse content and extract information. Combining these abilities, LLMs can create a story for the game, design narrative, and place tiles in appropriate places to create coherent worlds and playable games. We test Word2World with different LLMs and perform a thorough ablation study to validate each step. We open-source the code at https://github.com/umair-nasir14/Word2World.

We present latent combinational game design -- an approach for generating playable games that blend a given set of games in a desired combination using deep generative latent variable models. We use Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders (GMVAEs) which model the VAE latent space via a mixture of Gaussian components. Through supervised training, each component encodes levels from one game and lets us define blended games as linear combinations of these components. This enables generating new games that blend the input games as well as controlling the relative proportions of each game in the blend. We also extend prior blending work using conditional VAEs and compare against the GMVAE and additionally introduce a hybrid conditional GMVAE (CGMVAE) architecture which lets us generate whole blended levels and layouts. Results show that these approaches can generate playable games that blend the input games in specified combinations. We use both platformers and dungeon-based games to demonstrate our results.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools, capable of leveraging their training on natural language to write stories, generate code, and answer questions. But can they generate functional video game levels? Game levels, with their complex functional constraints and spatial relationships in more than one dimension, are very different from the kinds of data an LLM typically sees during training. Datasets of game levels are also hard to come by, potentially taxing the abilities of these data-hungry models. We investigate the use of LLMs to generate levels for the game Sokoban, finding that LLMs are indeed capable of doing so, and that their performance scales dramatically with dataset size. We also perform preliminary experiments on controlling LLM level generators and discuss promising areas for future work.

We present a demonstration of Ropossum, an authoring tool for the generation and testing of levels of the physics-based game, Cut the Rope. Ropossum integrates many features: (1) automatic design of complete solvable content, (2) incorporation of designer's input through the creation of complete or partial designs, (3) automatic check for playability and (4) optimization of a given design based on playability. The system includes a physics engine to simulate the game and an evolutionary framework to evolve content as well as an AI reasoning agent to check for playability. The system is optimised to allow on-line feedback and realtime interaction.

Several recent works have demonstrated the use of variational autoencoders (VAEs) for both generating levels in the style of existing games as well as blending levels across different games. Additionally, quality-diversity (QD) algorithms have also become popular for generating varied game content by using evolution to explore a search space while focusing on both variety and quality. In order to reap the benefits of both these approaches, we present a level generation and game blending approach that combines the use of VAEs and QD algorithms. Specifically, we train VAEs on game levels and then run the MAP-Elites QD algorithm using the learned latent space of the VAE as the search space. The latent space captures the properties of the games whose levels we want to generate and blend, while MAP-Elites searches this latent space to find a diverse set of levels optimizing a given objective such as playability. We test our method using models for 5 different platformer games as well as a blended domain spanning 3 of these games. Our results show that using MAP-Elites in conjunction with VAEs enables the generation of a diverse set of playable levels not just for each individual game but also for the blended domain while illuminating game-specific regions of the blended latent space.

In recent years AI models have learned to play games ranging from Go to Poker to StarCraft. One-by-one, the machines have demonstrated their superiority over even the strongest human players. With the challenge seemingly solved for existing games, what about testing AI in an entirely different way -- by having it design new games for humans to play? A team of researchers has proposed a Generative Adversarial Network based model tasked with creating playable and aesthetically appealing game levels for popular action-adventure video game series The Legend of Zelda. In their paper Bootstrapping Conditional GANs for Video Game Level Generation, researchers from New York University, IT University of Copenhagen, OriGen.ai, and modl.ai

We present a system for autonomously generating puzzles in the form of a 2D, tile-based world.  Puzzle design is entirely dependent on tile characteristics, which are implemented as abstract classes that can be modified by the system.  Thus, the system controls not only the base-level puzzle design but also (to some extent) the meta-level component design.  The result is a rich space of possible puzzles that the system explores with a combination of evolutionary computation and Q -learning.  The system autonomously produces a variety of puzzles of varying difficulty to create a game called Loki's Castle .  The system is almost completely autonomous, requiring only a minimal description of what a puzzle should include, and the abstraction allows extensibility so that future versions can invent entirely new classes of tiles.  Several puzzle examples are presented to demonstrate the system's capability.