Sketch2Map: A Game Map Design Support System Allowing Quick Hand Sketch Prototyping

Abstract

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 coastline and river contours 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 the real terrain. The second deterministic algorithm interprets the generated 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 wider variations. This framework allows designers for rapid-prototyping and trials-and-errors of game assets creation because it converts rich terrain assets from rough sketches 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 this two-stage terrain generation approach.

Info

URL: IEEE COG 2020

DOI: 10.1109/CoG47356.2020.9231754

Citation: .bib format