Automatic generation of tower defense levels using PCG

Simon Cheng Liu, Chaoran Li, Yue Li, Heng Ma, Xiao Hou, Yiming Shen, Licong Wang, Ze Chen, Xianghao Guo, Hengtong Lu, Yu Du, Qinting Tang

Abstract: Tower defense is a popular subgenre of real-time strategy game requiring detailed level design and difficulty balancing to create an enjoyable player experience. Because level production and testing are both time-consuming and labor-intensive, we propose and implement a framework to automate the process. We first analyze the three main components, or "building blocks", of the popular tower defense game Kingdom Rush: Frontiers (KRF), i.e. road maps, tower locations and monster sequences. We then automatically create new building blocks in the style of the original game, utilizing techniques from Procedural Content Generation (PCG), and assemble them to create new levels. We also add a fourth block: automated testing via a Monte Carlo search algorithm, to ensure the generated content is playable. We focus on KRF because it is a popular video game in the tower defense genre, and highlights some of the challenges of designing appropriate PCG and playtesting algorithms for a commercial video game.