Designer Modeling through Design Style Clustering

We propose modeling designer style in mixed-initiative game content creation tools as archetypical design traces. These design traces are formulated as transitions between design styles; these design styles are in turn found through clustering all intermediate designs along the way to making a complete design. This method is implemented in the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer, a research platform for mixed-initiative systems to create roguelike games. We present results both in the form of design styles for rooms, which can be analyzed to better understand the kind of rooms designed by users, and in the form of archetypical sequences between these rooms. We further discuss how the results here can be used to create style-sensitive suggestions. Such suggestions would allow the system to be one step ahead of the designer, offering suggestions for the next cluster, assuming that the designer will follow one of the archetypical design traces.