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Today marks the 2nd anniversary of this blog. Now that we’re 584 posts and 1233 followers later, I can definitely say that I’m glad my friend goaded me into starting it.

Over the past year we’ve talked about procedural generation in Civilization II, fantasy novel covers, wrapping paper, owls, oceans, word vectors, photo editors, No Man’s Sky, Seeds magazine, font manifolds, lying maps, agent-based social simulation, texture synthesis, ethical botmaking, zelda-style dungeon generation, and Bob Ross.

If the themes for last year were expressive range, framing, order, and infinity, I think that the theme for this year was flexibility, manifolds, smooth interpolation, and lots and lots and lots of neural networks. There were also some looks at practical applications for procedural generation, and an explosion of things made with Tracery. Plus some other new innovations, like WaveFunctionCollapse.

While there were a lot of new things this year, I felt like it was also a year of building on the past, and I anticipate that this next year will continue that. Some of the upcoming projects I’ve had my eye on are explicitly building on stuff we’ve talked about here. And technologies like using neural networks for generation are rapidly building on past discoveries. I look forward to seeing what comes next.