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Programming smart playtesting
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
INESC-ID, Lisboa, Portugal; Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal.
Open Universiteit, The Netherlands and Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain.
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2026 (English)In: ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, ISSN 1049-331X, E-ISSN 1557-7392, Vol. 35, no 3, article id 79Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Until recently the game industry heavily relied on manual playtesting to test the games it produces. Even if the benefits of introducing automated testing are acknowledged, it is rarely done in practice. Some of the main hurdles include the lack of automated testing tools that can target computer games as well as the complexity of automated game plays which are much more difficult to program than typical simple test sequences. This article presents an agent-based testing framework called aplib that comes with a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that allows complex playtests to be programmed more abstractly. A so-called goal structure is used to abstractly formulate a playtest scenario in terms of main goals and their decomposition into subgoals. Scenarios that are not too complicated can be formulated using static goal structures. More complex scenarios may need a test agent that can dynamically adapt its play according to the situation that evolves during the play. To handle such cases, aplib allows dynamic goals to be expressed as well. Invariants and pre-/post-conditions are used to assert the properties that a play is expected to satisfy. They include differential properties that allow constraints on the current state to be related to that of past states. Three case studies are included in the article. The first one aims to evaluate the performance of playtests programmed with aplib. The second shows that the approach can also be combined with other automated testing approaches, in this case reinforcement learning. The third shows the applicability of such playtests in a 3D setup and for non-functional testing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2026. Vol. 35, no 3, article id 79
Keywords [en]
agent-based testing, automated game testing, automated playtesting, DSL for playtesting
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-251519DOI: 10.1145/3742473ISI: 001714456500001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105030697494OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-251519DiVA, id: diva2:2049103
Funder
EU, Horizon 2020, 856716Available from: 2026-03-27 Created: 2026-03-27 Last updated: 2026-03-27Bibliographically approved

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Dignum, Frank

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Citation style
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