Measuring risk in stealth games.
Jonathan Tremblay, Pedro Andrade Torres, Clark Verbrugge · 2014
Level design for stealth games requires the ability to explore and understand the possible paths players may take through a given scenario and how they are impacted by different de-sign choices. Good tool support can help by demonstrating the existence of such paths, but for rapid, interactive design, the relative difficulty of possible solutions also needs to be quantified, in a way that correlates well with human per-ception of risk. Here we propose and evaluate three differ-ent metrics for defining and quantifying the risk of stealthy paths. We validate and compare these measures through a small human study, showing that a simple path-distance measure correlates best with human judgement. An evalua-tion of a non-trivial stealth scenario demonstrates the prac-ticality of our approach, and shows how such measures can be useful in understanding a level design.