Mythology and Procedural Generation

No one seemed to have a good write-up of the GDC session where Tarn Adams and Tanya Short talked about procedurally generated mythology. I was going to write it up myself, but it turns out there’s something that’s even better: the video has been posted for anyone to watch.

Featuring live generation of Moon Hunters levels and Dwarf Fortress’s upcoming creation mythologies, the talk gives a unique look under the hood. You will need a bit of background as to how Moon Hunters and Dwarf Fortress work to get the most out of it. But there aren’t a whole lot of talks like this, exploring the practical application of procedural generation in games from people who have designed them, with the results of the generator on display during the talk.

Tanya shows the level generation from Moon Hunters (including the Unity inspector for their generator and some of the prefabs). The macro-structure of the night sky constellations turned out to be key for tying the generated myths together. Past heroes get memorials in future playthroughs, letting your future characters react to them. (Moon Hunters is still doing content updates, so I’m excited to see how they develop it.)

Tarn, meanwhile, showed off the new myth generator and talked about how it ties into the overall Dwarf Fortress ecosystem. The goal for the new creation mythology generator is to create coherent fantasy settings for Dwarf Fortress. Right now, the worlds created in Dwarf Fortress mostly share the same fantasy setting; new elements can be added but there isn’t any structure to tie them together. 

With the myth generator, instead of a hodgepodge of fantasy elements that don’t have any relationship with each other, the idea is to create a story that ties together the elements that get used.

Something that he elaborated on a bit at the end that didn’t come out as much in the main talk is how the myth generator feeds directly into the mechanics of the rest of the game. For example, the cosmic egg can leave fragments that form continents and landforms on the map generator. Since Dwarf Fortress works by extreme emergence, feeding the structure of the creation myth into the rest of the systems should produce some very interesting results.