Academic research has produced numerous innovative PCG techniques, yet procedural level design remains unevenly adopted across the game development community. To understand why, we conducted a comprehensive survey of 120 game development professionals examining what developers actually experience when working with procedural tools. The survey covered current tool usage, adoption barriers, technical preferences, and future needs across level designers, game designers, technical artists, environment artists, programmers, and researchers. We present and analyze the survey responses using various techniques and visualizations. In addition, we developed an interactive online tool for anyone to explore patterns across demographic data segments and draw their own interpretations.

Procedural level generation empowers level designers with tools for generating many levels from a single specification, while engi- neers maintain the level generator. Despite advances in procedural techniques, little is known about their impact on long-term system maintenance. We explore how Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) can help improve procedural level design processes, and support maintenance by integrating level design sketches into generator- agnostic tools. This short paper examines the evolution of Ludo- scope, a state-of-the-art level generator used in the games Unex- plored 1 and 2. In over a decade, it has grown in complexity, with Unexplored 2’s generator now containing over 20K rewrite rules. We investigate how Ludomotion addressed maintenance chal- lenges, and how this impacts procedural level design. Our approach combines: 1) a bottom-up analysis of Ludoscope; and 2) a top-down exploration of a generic DSL for “level blueprints”. This paper con- tributes the first step and discusses ongoing work on a reusable framework for procedural level design. Our work takes a promising first step towards industrial-strength maintenance solutions.

Procedural Level Generation provides tools and techniques for generating many game levels from a single specification. Instead of creating levels by hand, level designers make use of generators that automate the creation process. However, iteratively improving a level’s design requires encoding generators of adventures, puzzles and encounters in notations that bear little resemblance to generated content. Raising the level quality is difficult, because it is hard to reason about bugs that can manifest inside generated content.

This paper investigates strategies to generate levels for action-adventure games. For this genre, level design is more critical than for rule-driven genres such as simulation or rogue-like role-playing games, for which procedural level generation has been successful in the past. The approach outlined by this article distinguishes between missions and spaces as two separate structures that need to be generated in two individual steps. It discusses the merits of different types of generative grammars for each individual step in the process. Notably, the approach acknowledges that the online generation of levels needs to be tailored strictly to the actual experience of a player. Therefore, the approach incorporates techniques to establish and exploit player models in actual play.