Tower Defense Generator: A Tool for Supporting Game Design Education

TOWER DEFENSE GENERATORA TOOL FOR SUPPORTING GAME DESIGN EDUCATION

Jose Zagal & Pitchatarn Lertudomtana

Supporting Game Design Education How to help students better learn and

practice game design?

Should be easy! Expert players Passionate about games Have lots of game ideas

Easy but…. (most) Students

Expert play does not (necessarily) lead to design skills

Can’t articulate design goals and intentions Have trouble coming up with innovative ideas

E.g. Want to make Halo 5!

How to leverage prior knowledge, yet allow for meaningful creativity?

See also: Zagal, J.P., Bruckman, A. (2009) "Novices, Gamers, and Scholars: Exploring the Challenges of Teaching About Games",  Game Studies 8:2

Tools For Supporting Game Design

Black Box White Box

Avoid overwhelming with ALL the details (white box)

Avoid inaccessibility and lack of agency (black box)

Let people create in powerful and meaningful ways

(but with interesting constraints)

Grey Box Tools

Tower Defense Game Generator Tower Defense Game?

Players must Build/Position “Towers” (Static Defenses) Decide when to upgrade them

Towers automatically attack enemies (creeps) that advance towards an endpoint

Tower Defense Games

Desktop Tower Defense (Preece 2007)Plants vs Zombies (PopCap Games 2009)

Simple to play, hard to understand deeply Deep and rich design space to explore

Tower Defense Generator (TDG) Tool for Designing Tower Defense Games

Currently consists of: Map Generator Map Editor XML specification for towers, enemies &

waves Game Engine (for playtesting)

Inspirations Constructional Design “a type of meta-design: [that] involves

the design of new tools and activities to support students in their own design activities” (Resnick et al., 1996)

Mixed-Initiative Design Computational Intelligence to Support

DesignersResnick, M., Bruckman, A., & Martin, F. (1996). Pianos Not Stereos: Creating Computational Construction Kits. Interactions, 3(5), 41-50.Smith, G., Whitehead, J., & Mateas, M. (2010). Tanagra: A Mixed-Initiative Level Design Tool. Paper presented at the FDG ’10: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.

“Intelligence” in the tool

Computational

Tool

Content(levels,

Provides Input

Designer

Generates, Filters,

and Outputs

Evaluates(tests, plays, edits)

Rapid Iteration

Learn to Explore a Design Space

Several spawn pointsUnusual Dimensions

What makes a “good” map?

How are they different?

Pacing?

Decisions?

Map Generator Baseline

Parameters E.g. Dimensions

Multiple Map Generation Heuristics Random Branching Cellular

Automata

Enemies appear from here(yellow flag)

Enemies want to go here(checkered flag)

This is the path they’ll (currently) follow

(purple)

Player can build anywhere that has a

“white box”

Enemies can’t walk through “brown”

border tiles

Enemies can walk over

anything with green borders

Exploring Design Space Different heuristics generate different

“looking” maps

Map Editor Support for “tweaking” maps

Maps that are “almost” there

Game Engine Playtest maps

generated

Simple AI pathfinding

See what happens

Helping Learners Reflect Heuristics for Map Generation

Flashlights that illuminate part of the design space

Allow for rapid iteration Refine parameters Identify “not-quite-there” maps LOTS of maps

“Just enough” agency

Helping Learners Reflect

Focus on one of the “pillars” of a Tower Defense game while the

others are invariant

Terrain Towers

Enemies

Current (and future) Work Formative assessment in formal

educational setting

Design/development of new features Allow designers to annotate with design

intentions/goals Develop new heuristics (map generation) Develop techniques for even faster

playtesting (game balancing)

Thank you for your time!(“Pre-Alpha”) Available : https://www.dropbox.com/s/xw2inqa18nl2mal/TowerD

efenseProject.exe PC Only (requires .NET and XNA) Warning: Pre-Alpha means “may not work

or have issues on your machine”

Jose [email protected]

http://facsrv.cdm.depaul.edu/~jzagal