Maintenance in procedural level design: Lessons from ludoscope

Procedural level generation empowers level designers with tools for generating many levels from a single specification, while engi- neers maintain the level generator. Despite advances in procedural techniques, little is known about their impact on long-term system maintenance. We explore how Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) can help improve procedural level design processes, and support maintenance by integrating level design sketches into generator- agnostic tools. This short paper examines the evolution of Ludo- scope, a state-of-the-art level generator used in the games Unex- plored 1 and 2. In over a decade, it has grown in complexity, with Unexplored 2’s generator now containing over 20K rewrite rules. We investigate how Ludomotion addressed maintenance chal- lenges, and how this impacts procedural level design. Our approach combines: 1) a bottom-up analysis of Ludoscope; and 2) a top-down exploration of a generic DSL for “level blueprints”. This paper con- tributes the first step and discusses ongoing work on a reusable framework for procedural level design. Our work takes a promising first step towards industrial-strength maintenance solutions.

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