Anyball - In Development Trailer
One aspect of procedural generation that I don’t think games use often enough generating rules and mechanics. We’ve got lots of examples of generating dungeons, landscapes, and other physical things. But for more abstract things there are way fewer things to point to.
Which is one reason why the in-development Anyball caught my attention: the players will never know the rules of the game starting out because they’re newly generated each game. I really like that aspect of procedural generation–discovery is always a fun way to use procgen techniques.
You can take discovery too far, of course: a short amount of experience with Eleusis will quickly demonstrate that humans are quite bad at figuring out complex secret rules without the affordances to guide them through the discovery process. The trick for procedural generation is that the things we generate need to have enough structure for people to anticipate what might be generated and how it relates to the rest of the world.
Fortunately for Anyball, sports equipment comes with quite a lot of affordances built in. There are both physical affordances–balls can roll when kicked–and cultural affordances–we expect that the numbers on a scoreboard will go up when we do something good. It’s a good foundation for building a generator.