An Exploration of Collision-based Enemy Morphology Generation

Abstract

Despite a great deal of prior research into Procedural Content Generation (PCG), relatively little prior work has explored generating enemies for video games. In particular, there is almost no work on generating enemy morphologies, the basic body plan or collision information for in-game enemies, despite the existence of related morphology generation work in robotics. In this paper, we explore three different novel approaches to generate enemy morphologies based on player collision information. We found that each approach provides different strengths and weaknesses, but all had equivalent or better performance than an evolutionary baseline adapted from prior robotics morphology work.