The PCG Assistant - Danesh
Mike Cook’s procedural generation tool has been released!
It’s not a generator, it’s a tool for analyzing generators. Any generator: just set some annotations in the code and it can take the output and settings of any generator function and show you the expressive range. You can track how changes you make to the generator affect the metrics of the output and collect a sample of the expressive range across a large randomized range of input parameters.
This kind of tool lets us move from feeling our way around individual settings for a generator and gives us a high-level picture of the possible outputs. Often, the problem when making a new generator is maximizing the surprises while minimizing the broken outputs.
For live generators, where we’re sailing in unknown waters without a good map of the possible outcomes, we tend to stick close to shore–only implementing the algorithms that we know will work. Danesh and tools like it give us a map and a compass that we can use to plot our way across the ocean.