New "Cake" Representation Enhances Dynamic Game Level Generation

This paper proposes a new method for procedural content generation (PCG) in video games, focusing on the dynamic nature of game levels. Traditional PCG often abstracts away the temporal element, but this research introduces a "cake" representation that inherently captures how levels evolve during gameplay. To leverage this new representation, the authors developed Playtrace Reconstructive Partitioning (PRP), a domain-independent algorithm designed to generate levels using the "cake" structure. Evaluations against six state-of-the-art PCG techniques in the game Sokoban demonstrated that PRP successfully generates valid levels while maintaining solution diversity, suggesting a more effective way to handle the implicit dynamics of game design.