Sentient Sketchbook

Sentient Sketchbook was introduced during the 2013 Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games [1]. The technology for generating suggestions has been presented in papers for the EvoStar [2] conference (2013) and the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation [3] Conference (2013), and in greater detail in the Evolutionary Computation Journal [4]. The role of suggestions as a prompt for mixed-initiative co-creativity was formalized in a paper for the 2014 Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games [5]. The best student paper of the 2013 conference on AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment elaborated on how the evaluations of Sentient Sketchbook can be generalized for other types of game levels such as dungeons or first-person shooter arenas [6]. Extensions of the current version of Sentient Sketchbook were presented in the 2014 conference on Computational Intelligence and Games: one paper [7] proposed additions which take the human designer's style, process and visual goals into account, and won the best paper award, while the other paper [8] proposed an algorithm which simultaneously targets strategic quality and visual diversity and was also nominated for best paper. Another extension of the map sketch concept was presented in [9], where level evolution was carried out in phases, with each phase refining map sketches evolved in the previous phase. The AI behind Sentient Sketchbook has also been modularized as a webservice, available here and documented in [10].

Publication List

[1] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., and Togelius, J.: "Sentient Sketchbook: Computer-Assisted Game Level Authoring" in Proceedings of the 8th Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG), 2013. PDF BibTeX

[2] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., and Togelius, J.: "Generating Map Sketches for Strategy Games" in Proceedings of Applications of Evolutionary Computation, 2013. PDF (draft) BibTeX

[3] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., and Togelius, J.: "Enhancements to Constrained Novelty Search: Two-Population Novelty Search for Generating Game Content" in Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Competition Conference (GECCO), 2013. [Best Paper Award of the DETA/Self* track] PDF BibTeX

[4] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., and Togelius, J.: "Constrained Novelty Search: A Study on Game Content Generation", Evolutionary Computation 21(1), 2015, pp. 101-129. PDF BibTeX

[5] Yannakakis, G.N., Liapis, A., Alexopoulos, C.: "Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity" in Proceedings of the 9th Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2014. PDF BibTeX

[6] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., and Togelius, J.: "Towards a Generic Method of Evaluating Game Levels" in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2013. [Best Student Paper Award] PDF BibTeX

[7] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N. and Togelius, J.: "Designer Modeling for Sentient Sketchbook" in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 2014. [Best Paper Award] PDF BibTeX

[8] Preuss, M., Liapis, A., and Togelius, J.: "Searching for Good and Diverse Game Levels" in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), 2014. [Best Paper Nominee] PDF BibTeX

[9] Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N.: "Refining the Paradigm of Sketching in AI-Based Level Design" in Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2015. PDF BibTeX

[10] Liapis, A.: "Map Sketch Generation as a Service" in Proceedings of the AIIDE workshop on Experimental AI in Games, 2015. PDF BibTeX