# Baba is Y'all: Collaborative Mixed-Initiative Level Design

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14294 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14294/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Generating and Blending Game Levels via Quality-Diversity in the Latent Space of a Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12463/) (2021)
- [Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13269/) (2023)
- [The Quality-Diversity Transformer: Generating Behavior-Conditioned Trajectories with Decision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16207/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Quality-Diversity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06826/) (2021)
- [TropeTwist: Trope-based Narrative Structure Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09672/) (2022)
- [Story Designer: Towards a Mixed-Initiative Tool to Create Narrative Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09294/) (2022)
- [The Procedural Content Generation Benchmark: An Open-source Testbed for Generative Challenges in Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21474/) (2025)
- [Measuring Diversity of Game Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15192/) (2024)
- [Mechanic Maker 2.0: Reinforcement Learning for Evaluating Generated Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09476/) (2023)
- [PANGeA: Procedural Artificial Narrative using Generative AI for Turn-Based Video Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19721/) (2024)
- [Aesthetic Bot: Interactively Evolving Game Maps on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05017/) (2022)
- [Baba is LLM: Reasoning in a Game with Dynamic Rules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19095/) (2025)
- [The Impact of Visualizing Design Gradients for Human Designers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04147/) (2021)
- [Towards QD-suite: developing a set of benchmarks for Quality-Diversity algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03207/) (2022)
- [Threshold Designer Adaptation: Improved Adaptation for Designers in Co-creative Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09269/) (2022)
- [Keke AI Competition: Solving puzzle levels in a dynamically changing mechanic space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04911/) (2022)
- [Video Game Level Design as a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04862/) (2025)
- [MeronymNet: A Hierarchical Approach for Unified and Controllable Multi-Category Object Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08818/) (2021)
- [The Quest for Content: A Survey of Search-Based Procedural Content Generation for Video Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04710/) (2023)
- [Procedural Generation of First Person Shooter Maps using Map-Elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30570/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a collaborative mixed-initiative system for building levels for the puzzle game "Baba is You". Unlike previous mixed-initiative systems, Baba is Y'all is designed for collaborative asynchronous creation by multiple users over the internet. The system includes several AI-assisted features to help designers, including a level evolver and an automated player for playtesting. The level archives catalogues levels according to which mechanics are implemented and not implemented, allowing the system to ask users to design levels with specific combinations of mechanics. We describe the operation of the system and the results of small-scale informal user test, and discuss future development paths for this system as well as for collaborative mixed-initiative systems in general.