Design and implementation of a survival game towards achieving user’s satisfaction by providing balanced difficulty

Abstract

Recently due to high popularity of video games, Procedural Content Generation (PCG) becomes an approach for automatically creating levels in game with balanced difficulty. The PCG is a solution towards automatic creation of levels with balanced difficulty. Among the existing works, not only very few recent PCG-based difficulty balancing solutions is found, but algorithms are also computationally intensive due to the presence of complex techniques like evolutionary computing, graph algorithms etc. In this paper, we develop a low overhead mathematical model based PCG scheme with the rule of variation and curve fitting. Firstly, relationship between difficulty and performance parameters of the game is setup using this model. Then, to make the model more reliable, difficulty parameters are adjusted to cope with the real performance of a player. Finally, the proposed scheme is tested on a survival game ‘Helip’ developed by us. The game shows satisfactory performance in response time, user friendliness, visual aesthetics and innovation based on opinion of the players. Moreover, the proposed difficulty balancing scheme is evaluated in terms of opinion score and player’s performance to be more balanced compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Our balancing scheme also has the lowest overhead in terms of running time.