Mortar: Evolving Mechanics for Automatic Game Design

We present Mortar, a system for autonomously evolving game mechanics for automatic game design. Game mechanics define the rules and interactions that govern gameplay, and designing them manually is a time-consuming and expert-driven process. Mortar combines a quality-diversity algorithm with a large language model to explore a diverse set of mechanics, which are evaluated by synthesising complete games that incorporate both evolved mechanics and those drawn from an archive. The mechanics are evaluated by composing complete games through a tree search procedure, where the resulting games are evaluated by their ability to preserve a skill-based ordering over players -- that is, whether stronger players consistently outperform weaker ones. We assess the mechanics based on their contribution towards the skill-based ordering score in the game. We demonstrate that Mortar produces games that appear diverse and playable, and mechanics that contribute more towards the skill-based ordering score in the game. We perform ablation studies to assess the role of each system component and a user study to evaluate the games based on human feedback.

Word2World: Generating Stories and Worlds through Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their worth across a diverse spectrum of disciplines. LLMs have shown great potential in Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as well, but directly generating a level through a pre-trained LLM is still challenging. This work introduces Word2World, a system that enables LLMs to procedurally design playable games through stories, without any task-specific fine-tuning. Word2World leverages the abilities of LLMs to create diverse content and extract information. Combining these abilities, LLMs can create a story for the game, design narrative, and place tiles in appropriate places to create coherent worlds and playable games. We test Word2World with different LLMs and perform a thorough ablation study to validate each step. We open-source the code at https://github.com/umair-nasir14/Word2World.

LLMatic: Neural Architecture Search via Large Language Models and Quality-Diversity Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of accomplishing a broad spectrum of tasks. Their abilities span numerous areas, and one area where they have made a significant impact is in the domain of code generation. In this context, we view LLMs as mutation and crossover tools. Meanwhile, Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms are known to discover diverse and robust solutions. By merging the code-generating abilities of LLMs with the diversity and robustness of QD solutions, we introduce LLMatic, a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm. While LLMs struggle to conduct NAS directly through prompts, LLMatic uses a procedural approach, leveraging QD for prompts and network architecture to create diverse and highly performant networks. We test LLMatic on the CIFAR-10 image classification benchmark, demonstrating that it can produce competitive networks with just $2,000$ searches, even without prior knowledge of the benchmark domain or exposure to any previous top-performing models for the benchmark.