Genetic-WFC: Extending Wave Function Collapse With Genetic Search

Raphael Bailly (1) , Guillaume Levieux (1)

1 CEDRIC - ILJ - CEDRIC - Interactivité pour Lire et Jouer

This paper presents Genetic-WFC, a procedural level generation algorithm that mixes genetic optimization with Wave Function Collapse, a local adjacency constraints propagation algorithm. We use a synthetic player to evaluate the novelty, safety and complexity of the generated levels. Novelty is maximized when the synthetic player goes on tiles not visited for a long time, safety is related to how far it can see, and complexity evaluates the variability of the surrounding tiles. WFC extracts constraints from example levels, and allows us to perform the genetic search on levels with few local asset placement errors, while using as little level design rules as possible. We show that we are able to rely on WFC while optimizing the results, first by influencing WFC asset selection and then by re-encoding the chosen modules back to our genotype, in order to optimize crossover. We compare the fitness curves and best maps of our method with other approaches. We then visually explore the kind of levels we are able to generate by sampling different values of safety and complexity, giving a glimpse of the variability that our approach is able to reach.

Mots clés: Procedural Content Generation; Level Design; Player Experience; Variability; Wave Function Collapse; Genetic Algorithm; Video Games

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Raphael Bailly, Guillaume Levieux. Genetic-WFC: Extending Wave Function Collapse With Genetic Search. IEEE Transactions on Games, 2022, pp.1-10. ⟨10.1109/TG.2022.3192930⟩. ⟨hal-03770729⟩