Tanagra: Reactive Planning and Constraint Solving for Mixed-Initiative Level Design

Abstract

Tanagra is a mixed-initiative tool for level design, allowing a human and a computer to work together to produce a level for a 2-D platformer. An underlying, reactive level generator ensures that all levels created in the environment are playable, and provides the ability for a human designer to rapidly view many different levels that meet their specifications. The human designer can iteratively refine the level by placing and moving level geometry, as well as through directly manipulating the pacing of the level. This paper presents the design environment, its underlying architecture that integrates reactive planning and numerical constraint solving, and an evaluation of Tanagra's expressive range.