An Explorative Design Process for Game Map Generation Based on Satellite Images and Playability Factors

This paper proposes a tool for 3D Procedural Terrain Generation in games. The main objective of this study is to assess the quality of the generated terrains and thus the experience of the user. The tool measures how traversable a terrain is, how long it takes to walk across and how much of it is accessible. The produced results can be used to further refine the generation method. The evaluation consists of multiple terrains being produced, based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) trained on satellite images. A path finding algorithm is then used to evaluate the traversability of each terrain between two points on the map. Results show that the proposed method can generate quite diverse and interesting maps and that the proposed metric can be used for evaluation of playability.