Sonancia

Sonancia is a system built for generating multiple facets of horror games, with the intention of creating tense and frightful experiences. Sonancia generates the architecture of a haunted mansion (with rooms and doors which may contain monsters or quest items) as well as the level's soundscape by allocating audio assets within the rooms and mixing them as the player traverses the level. Level generation and soundscape generation are orchestrated by notions of tension and suspense; the level generator attempts to match a designer-specified progression of tension while the sound generator attempts to prompt the player's suspense in rooms where tension is low.

Relevant Publications

  • Phil Lopes, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N Yannakakis: "Targeting Horror via Level and Soundscape Generation," in Proceedings of the AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, 2015. PDF BibTex

  • Phil Lopes, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis: "Framing Tension for Game Generation," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity. 2016. PDF BibTex

  • Phil Lopes, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N Yannakakis: "Sonancia: Sonification of Procedurally Generated Game Levels," in Proceedings of the ICCC workshop on Computational Creativity & Games, 2015. PDF BibTex

  • Phil Lopes, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis: "Modelling Affect for Horror Soundscapes," IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, vol. 10, no 2, pp. 209-222, 2019. PDF BibTex

  • Phil Lopes, Georgios N. Yannakakis and Antonios Liapis: "RankTrace: Relative and Unbounded Affect Annotation," In Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2017. PDF BibTex

  • Elizabeth Camilleri, Georgios N. Yannakakis and Antonios Liapis: "Towards General Models of Player Affect," In Proceedings of the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 2017. PDF BibTex

  • Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Mark J. Nelson, Mike Preuss and Rafael Bidarra: "Orchestrating Game Generation," in Transactions on Games, vol. 11, no 1, pp. 48-68, 2019. PDF HTML BibTex