Level Design Guidelines Applied to Procedural Open-World Games - How to implement level design in procedural open-world games following the intended game experience

Abstract

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is widely used in open-world games to ad dress issues of scale and content creation. However, it is often driven primarily by technical considerations rather than experiential intent. This thesis investigates how level design principles and practices can be used to drive procedural generation algorithms in open-world games while being aligned with an intended game experience. The concepts of game experience, open-world games, level design, and procedural content generation, are used as the four foundational pillars of this work. This thesis explores the interconnections between level design and the rest of the pillars, and synthesizes the findings into a set of design guidelines divided into 3 categories: game design, guidance, and spaces. These guidelines are then used in a practical prototype that explores how experiential design principles can be translated into game systems through different PCG techniques. The research adopts an exploratory approach grounded in Research Through Design, positioning implementation as a means of probing feasibility rather than empirical validation. While the prototypes are not evaluated through player studies, they exemplify how level design theoretical tools can be used to inform procedural systems that follow player experience considerations. This work contributes a conceptual framework and practical grounding for future investigations into experience-driven PCG in open-world games, highlighting both the potential and the importance of the presence of level design when implementing procedural generation algorithms.