Heuristics for Placing the Spawn Points in Multiplayer First Person Shooters

摘要

Level design in first person shooters is a critical and complex process with many facets. Among them, the placement of the spawn points, i.e., the positions of the level where players starts the game after being killed, has a huge impact on the game experience. In this work, we propose a novel approach to this problem that combines a set of design rules with a graph-based analysis of the level. As a results, we design a set of heuristics that, based on the topological features of the graphs extracted from the levels, can be used for the placement of spawn point. Finally, we test our approach with a small user study on three different levels, comparing our heuristic placement with an uniform strategy. Although preliminary, our results are promising and suggest that the level design principles are effectively captured by our heuristics.