In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search Based Software
Engineering (SBSE), an approach to software engineering in which search based …

Delineating the tremendous growth in this area, the Handbook of Approximation Algorithms
and Metaheuristics covers fundamental, theoretical topics as well as advanced, practical …

Balancing the options available to players in a way that ensures rich variety and viability is a
vital factor for the success of any video game, and particularly competitive multiplayer …

The video-game industry has recently grown from focused markets to mainstream. The
advancements the industry has been enjoying motivated researchers to propose techniques …

Video game testing has become a major investment of time, labor, and expense in the game
industry. Particularly the balancing of in-game units, characters, and classes can cause long …

In this paper, we discuss the interest and the need to evaluate the difficulty of single player
video games. We first show the importance of difficulty, drawing from semiotics to explain the …

Game balancing is the fine-tuning phase in which a functioning game is adjusted to be
deep, fair, and interesting. Balancing is difficult and time-consuming, as designers must …

With ICARUS, we introduce a framework for autonomous video game playing, testing, and
bug reporting. We report on the design rationale, the practical implementation, and its use in …

This article proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm to perform automated
analysis and detection of gameplay issues in complex 3-D navigation environments. The …

Video games systems are known for their complexity, concurrency and non-determinism,
which makes them prone to challenging tacit bugs. Video games development is costly and …