miWFC - Designer Empowerment through mixed-initiative Wave Function Collapse

miWFC - Designer Empowerment through mixed-initiative Wave Function Collapse

Langendam, Thijmen S. L. (Student TU Delft)
Bidarra, Rafael (TU Delft Computer Graphics and Visualisation)

Karpouzis, Kostas (editor)
Gualeni, Stefano (editor)
Pirker, Johanna (editor)
Fowler, Allan (editor)

2022

Wave Function Collapse (WFC) is a powerful generative algorithm, able to create locally-similar output based on a single example input. One of the inherent limitations of the original WFC is that it often requires users to understand its inner workings, and possibly make their own ad-hoc mods, to achieve satisfactory results. Besides distracting from your creative task, this strongly reduces the algorithm's effective usefulness to a small group of technical users. We propose miWFC, a novel mixed-initiative approach to WFC aimed at overcoming these drawbacks. Its main focus is on providing intuitive control to its users, in a way that matches their usual creative workflow. Among its main features, this approach provides (i) interactive navigation through design history, including controlled backtracking, (ii) precise manual editing of the output for direct expression of design intent, and (iii) interactive manipulation of tile weights, to tweak the global appearance of the output. We evaluated a prototype implementation of our approach among game artists and other creative professionals, and concluded that its features were largely considered useful and supportive of their creative work.

constraint solving
human-computer interaction
interaction design
level generation
mixed-initiative
procedural content generation
texture synthesis
wave function collapse

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:12513bc2-de1f-405b-ad7a-5ab854beaf32

https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3563266

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York

978-1-4503-9795-7

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022

17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, FDG 2022, 2022-09-05 → 2022-09-08, Athens, Greece

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2022 Thijmen S. L. Langendam, Rafael Bidarra