An approach to providing feedback at the design phase in game authoring tools

In this position paper, we propose and discuss the development of an authoring tool to aid designers in their jobs of creating game worlds. The long term goal of this research is to present mechanisms that can be used to measure the features of the design characteristics of games. The proposed tool should offer ongoing informative feedback to the level designer; this feedback will relate to the difficulty (and ideally to how interesting players might find the game) in the current level to aid the designer gauge the design. Currently, we choose an exemplar game (intruders and patrollers in a grid with shapes offering 'cover' to the agents in the game) and propose a set of measures that may inform the designer as to the effect of changes they make on the current difficulty of the level.