Phenry Ewing: A Million Little Players: Monte Carlo Simulations for Game Design
44This will be a fun & gentle, but hopefully immediately useful, introduction to Monte Carlo simulations. I'll draw from my experiences using them in various design capacities, such as:
•Coding a simple sim to analyze an existing physical game (Mafia/Werewolf) to understand its balance and improve how it's played
•Writing a bot to play a huge, sprawling visual novel game (Neo Cab) to explore every nook and cranny of the story, finding dead content, balancing the in-game economy, and fixing dead ends we didn't know we had.
•Combining real user research data from thousands of playerson an in-development trivia game (Cat Burglar) with Monte Carlo techniques to translate a loose creative goal into a fine-tuned, robust difficulty curve that works for potentially millions of players at different skill levels.
Lead-in music generated by Sonat Uzun.