This year’s Roguelike Celebration has a great list of speakers lined up. It’ll take place in San Fransisco this November. They’ll hopefully be posting the videos of the talks again (last year’s talks can be viewed here).
To get a ticket, go here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roguelike-celebration-2017-tickets-36769508590
November is looking like a great month for procedural generation stuff.
TRASEVOL_DOG (aka Rémy Devaux) is the creator of numerous interactive artworks, including a lot of stuff for the Pico-8 fantasy console. This post, about generating complex things that make sense, hits right on one of my core interests:
When making any Thing Generator, you can’t always only focus on the generated results. You’ll need to focus on the generation itself as well. The systems you make and/or use can be reworked and taken in new direction to achieve the goals you want to meet. And if your goal is to let your Coherent Thing Generator have expendable complexity, you betcha there’s a way.
There’s a survey of the structure of several different generators, finishing with an implementation of WaveFunctionCollapse. (Including experimenting with using WFC to generate music!)
I especially like the summary:
In the end, no algorithm can be perfect for everything. So why not just make ultra-specific algorithms?
In my experience, generations that do the best job are the ones you make with your precise goal in mind, like the one you’re seeing above. Think of the details and twists you want before starting and then work your way towards those.
Read it here: https://trasevol.dog/2017/09/01/di19/
It looks like ProcJam 2017 (November 4th-13th) will have a great mix of speakers. While there won’t be a live talk day this year, there’s discussion of live-streaming the talks.
More information on the ProcJam site: http://www.procjam.com/2017/09/11/procjam-speakers-announced/
And while I’m talking about ProcJam, the second issue of Seeds is still looking for submissions: http://www.procjam.com/seeds/ Just send them in by the 15th! Last year’s issue had a ton of great content, and I’m looking forward to reading about your stuff in this year’s issue!
Between the art packs, the tutorials, the grant, and the speakers, this is shaping up to be a banner year for ProcJam.
This dev blog post by the Heaven’s Vault team immediately pinged my radar when people on Twitter started talking about it. They’re working towards what I think is the next step in authoring interactive narratives.
The core idea here is to reincorporate generated content back into the narrative. Heaven’s Vault is about finding artifacts, and the procedurally generated artifacts that the player finds points to other things to explore. As the generated content is fed back into the generator, it triggers hand-authored content and opens new generative possibilities.
I’ve talked before about how chaining different generators together can be useful. And they’re not the first to experiment with this narrative approach–some NaNoGenMo projects have attempted similar techniques. But they take it much further than previous examples.
The biggest innovation here is that they can combine it with their automated game-player: a system that runs through the content. Looking at the logs from that, they can find interesting combinations and manually expand upon them.
This is the exact kind of mixed-initiative hybrid centaur process that I think points to the future of procedural generation. And maybe the future of human creativity in general.
https://heavens-vault-game.tumblr.com/post/164556877780/procedural-narrative-cupcakes
There is some neat tree-generation work in Charlie Hewitt’s recent dissertation. It starts with L-System and parametric approaches, and adds improvements.
The results look quite convincing as trees, plus seem to be nicely controllable. Oh, and the whole thing runs in Blender.
I just read your last post about the Islamic Art Drawing Tools and learned that you "really like parametric tools like this, where the history and rules of constructing something is interactively adjustable". Ok so here’s my tool Iterograph, it’s a bit hard to get in but you can let the randomness do the work :)
The idea is to draw several times a simple shape by changing its position (according to an angle step) and evolving the characteristics (e.g. from small to big, alternating colors, …).
Here’s a twitter bots daily posting some artworks from the user gallery : https://twitter.com/iterograph
Have fun!
This is very cool.
Some of these remind me of Kandinsky, though he would probably have been more asymmetrical:
Others have a very vaporwave-pop feel. I could see some of these as logos in the 90s:
Negative space!
Spirographs!
Neat stuff.
In the same vein as my appreciation of Nail Polish Bot, I also like the way that Martin O’Leary’s @brutal_exe twitter bot generates a consistent aesthetic with its 3D explorations.
The generator uses a path tracer that renders views of fractal architectural forms. The grainy side-effect is re-purposed as part of the Brutalist, low-fi phorograph aesthetic.
I think this intersection of the source material and the frequency of image generation helps to maximize the interesting image content. The fractal forms have many interesting shapes, and the camera moves just enough to have most of the images be both unique and striking.
Martin was partially inspired by Íñigo Quílez. who has made a lot of procedural generation and demoscene works.
In honor of the new anniversary No Man’s Sky update (which I haven’t had a chance to play yet) here’s Innes’ talk about the terrain generation, newly available on YouTube:
I’ve talked about it before, but it’s a good talk.
Innes also talked at the Tech Toolbox, covering procedural texture tech. Tool development has huge overlap with technical art, and all of the stuff from that panel session is right up my alley. Definitely worth watching: Michael Cook explains Danesh, Chris Martins talks linear logic, Cukia Kimani shows off Semblance’s for procedural animations on 2d meshes, and more. You should watch it.
I really like parametric tools like this, where the history and rules of constructing something is interactively adjustable.
This particular one was developed as a side effect of Engare, a game by Mahdi Bahrami about motion and geometry.
The history of Islamic art has a lot of fascinating context I won’t get in to here, but its use of geometric patterns and rules overlaps with my interest in procedural art. I’m glad that Mahdi has found a way to bring some of that to the interactive world.
Due to the Kickstarter funding, this year ProcJam is announcing a grant to support someone working with generative software. If this sounds like you, you should definitely apply. They’ve got a great panel of experts who will be reviewing the shortlist. I’m very happy to see the community get support like this.