The pros and cons of procedural generation in Overland

I’m not in the paid alpha for Overland. (I don’t have time! I’ve got neural nets to practice painting with! Plus, Stellaris is coming out next week.) But I’ve been following the coverage of Overland with interest, because it’s a procedural post-apocalyptic road trip game. So this article on Gamasutra certainly caught my eye.

One reason I’ve mentioned Overland here before is that the developers have been pretty open about the challenges of using procedural generation–including discussing to downsides. 

I like the discussion of constraints and only using content in chunks of subsets:

“The other thing that helps address a lot of the potholes is to have a TON of ingredients but only ever deploy them in subsets. Spelunky is a fantastic example of how to do this super effectively. Definitely a big inspiration to us even though we’re doing more of a tactics thing.”

They also mention keeping the generation spiky instead of balanced, the usefulness of visual variety, and the addition of smaller goals along the way. They also discuss the difficulty of working on the system when it feels like progress is stalled.

But really, go read the entire article.

(Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezLzLAO_Iic)