Sketch2Map: A Game Map Design Support System Allowing Quick Hand Sketch Prototyping
Tong Wang, Shuichi Kurabayashi · 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) · 2020
Modern open-world games require a vast extent of land with attractive diversity. However, creating such terrain is one of the most challenging tasks due to its large data size and the number of iterations in development. This paper presents a sketch-based map design support system that can help designers to create a game world with simple sketches, by transferring hand-drawn sketches of the game world such as coastline contours and river outlines into 3D terrain. This unified sketch-to-level framework involves a two-stage generative model that consists of the cGAN to convert a sketch into an elevation bitmap and a deterministic algorithm to generate a level asset. The first cGAN process probabilistically generates wider variations of elevation bitmap, including diverse terrain elements exploiting its model trained against terrain data. The second deterministic algorithm interprets the bitmap to generate the practical terrain asset. This combination of the probabilistic model and the deterministic model is highly effective in reflecting designers' intension enough while generating variations. This framework allows designers for rapid-prototyping and trials-and-errors game assets creation by converting rough sketches to rich terrain assets at interactive speed. We use more than two thousand procedural game maps pairing with corresponding sketches created by spline interpolation as our training data. The prototype implementation of this framework shows the effectiveness and practicality of our two-stage terrain generation approach.