ANGELINA is an automated game design system which has previously been built as a single software block which designs games from start to finish. In this paper we outline a roadmap for the development of a new version of ANGELINA, designed to iterate on games in different ways to produce a continuous creative process that will improve the quality of its work, but more importantly improve the perception of the software as being an independently creative piece of software. We provide an initial report of the system's structure here as well as results from the first working module of the system.
Automated game design is often conflated with the notion of ruleset design. One explanation for this is the bias in games research towards a particular classical' concept of what a game is. Early research in AI focused on abstract games that are almost entirely described by a set of rules and nothing else (Checkers, Chess and Go being the best examples here). As games research moved more into digital games, classic arcade stereotypes replaced this notion; games with very strong notions of winning, losing, scoring. We can see this trend continuing to the modern day in the design and influences of the Video Game Description Language, VGDL @cite_6 .
@cite_6
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We propose a powerful new tool for conducting research on computational intelligence and games. PyVGDL' is a simple, high-level description language for 2D video games, and the accompanying software library permits parsing and instantly playing those games. The streamlined design of the language is based on defining locations and dynamics for simple building blocks, and the interaction effects when such objects collide, all of which are provided in a rich ontology. It can be used to quickly design games, without needing to deal with control structures, and the concise language is also accessible to generative approaches. We show how the dynamics of many classical games can be generated from a few lines of PyVGDL. The main objective of these generated games is to serve as diverse benchmark problems for learning and planning algorithms; so we provide a collection of interfaces for different types of learning agents, with visual or abstract observations, from a global or first-person viewpoint. To demonstrate the library's usefulness in a broad range of learning scenarios, we show how to learn competent behaviors when a model of the game dynamics is available or when it is not, when full state information is given to the agent or just subjective observations, when learning is interactive or in batch-mode, and for a number of different learning algorithms, including reinforcement learning and evolutionary search.