A Framework to Create Collaborative Games for Team Building using Procedural Content Generation

We present a framework to design collaborative games for team building that employs a search-based procedural content generation toolset to help designers creating levels. It comprises a multiplayer game with asymmetric interaction in which a player must reach the exit of a maze within a time limit, while wearing a head mounted display. The maze is complex and the player could not reach the exit on time without a team there to help her using a large number of printed maps describing candidate mazes. The player describes what she sees to the team who use such information to identify which one of the several available maps the player is currently navigating in virtual reality. Each game requires the generation of hundreds of very similar maps with several aliasing (confusing) situations but at the same time need to have a solution to guarantee that if the team members collaborate effectively they can guide the player to the exit. It would be infeasible for a human designer to provide such a massive number of maps for every game played. Accordingly, we developed automatic authoring tools to help designers generate such large sets of maps and also to optimize them based on design principles focusing on fun and pace. Our preliminary results show that the authoring pipeline we created can generate games (set of maps) adherent to such design principles.