Procedural Content Generation for Creating Levels of Educational Games
Procedural content generation, games, level generation
Educational digital games has been an area of research that has increased with the years throughout the international scene. This fact has been due to the potential that the games have of fun, immersion and stimulation to the learning of natural and personalized way. Thus, one of the great challenges found in this area is the creation of games that meet the contents proposed to be taught or practiced. In this sense, the procedural content generation has emerged as an area that can assist the development of educational games. The procedural content generation (PCG) deals with the automatic creation of contents such as textures, sounds, objects and, in the context of this work, the level’s generation. Thus, PCG contributes to the creation of new levels without the need for human intervention. With this, the research seeks to make use of PCG technique to create levels of educational games that require the player to achieve certain pedagogical goals throughout the game. For this, we propose a generation approach in three stages: (i) generation of the basic structure of the level (ex: only floors and walls); (ii) The generation of elements related to the pedagogical objectives of the level; (iii) complete the remainder of the level with enemies and other scenario elements. In this way, it can be used to create different challenges and scenarios so that a student can practice certain content, since whenever a challenge is completed, a new challenge can be generated for the student. In this way, this approach will be investigated using the grammar-based PCG technique. Therefore, we seek to verify if the technique in conjunction with the proposed approach assists in the generation of contents and creates them effectively, evaluating their quality and functionalities with elementary students.