Evaluation of Algorithms for Randomizing Key Item Locations in Game Worlds

In the past few years, game randomizers have become increasingly popular. In general, a game randomizer takes some aspect of a game that is usually static and shuffles it somehow. In particular, in this paper we will discuss the type of randomizer that shuffles the locations of items in a game where certain key items are needed to traverse the game world and access some of these locations. Examples of these types of games include series such as
The Legend of Zelda
and
Metroid
. In order to accomplish this shuffling in such a way that the player is able to reach the end of the game, some novel algorithms in graph theory must be utilized, where the game world and its item locations are represented as a graph and each edge on the graph has some rule for which items are required to traverse it. In this paper, we define these algorithms formally and evaluate them with different metrics that can guide a developer’s decision about which algorithm works best for their game.