Video games are a dynamic medium experienced over time. However, many existing Procedural Content Generation (PCG) approaches abstract away this dynamic nature. In this paper, we introduce a novel, domain-independent 'cake' representation for game levels that implicitly encodes dynamic information. We present a novel level generation approach, Playtrace Reconstructive Partitioning (PRP), specifically developed for this cake representation.
We compare PRP against six state-of-the-art PCG approaches in the game domain of Sokoban, finding that our method can generate valid levels without sacrificing solution diversity. We believe our cake representation more neatly encodes the implicit dynamic nature of games compared to existing representations, which allows for our domain-agnostic level generation algorithm PRP.
Blogger's Review: This research successfully integrates dynamic characteristics into level generation through the introduction of the 'cake' representation. The PRP method opens new avenues for leveraging procedural content generation techniques in game design, making it a worthy topic for further exploration and application.