A level designer typically creates the levels of a game to cater for a certain set of objectives, or mission. But in procedural content generation, it is common to treat the creation of missions and the generation of levels as two separate concerns. This often leads to generic levels that allow for various missions. However, this also creates a generic impression for the player, because the potential for synergy between the objectives and the level is not utilised. Following up on the mission-space generation concept, as described by Dormans, we explore the possibilities of procedurally generating a level from a designer-made mission. We use a generative grammar to transform a mission into a level in a mixed-initiative design setting. We provide two case studies, dungeon levels for a rogue-like game, and platformer levels for a metroidvania game. The generators differ in the way they use the mission to generate the space, but are created with the same tool for content generation based on model transformations. We discuss the differences between the two generation processes and compare it with a parameterized approach.
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Academic design research often fails to contribute to design practice. This dissertation explores how design research collaborations can provide knowledge that design professionals will use in practice. The research shows that design professionals are not addressed as an important audience between the many audiences of collaborative research projects. The research provides insight in the learning process by design professionals in design research collaborations and it identifies opportunities for even more learning. It shows that design professionals can learn about more than designing, but also about application domains or project organization.
In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.
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