Travel novels were one of the trends in last November’s NaNoGenMo. As a genre, travel memoirs combine the jumbled juxtaposition of encyclopedia entries with a recurring rhythm. The overall journey gives the novel order, while the organization by location provides the context. Thus, the genre is a good match for current generate text techniques.
Martin O’Leary’sThe Deserts of the West begins, like so many fantasy authors do, with a map. The journey across the procedurally generated maps is described in a style that evokes Calvino’s Invisible Cities, while the title is referenced in the Jorge Luis Borges quote.
Like all travel novels, the information is arranged geographically and temporally, with an entry for each place that’s in the order they’re reached in the journey. The descriptions can be a bit repetitive, but that’s only to be expected in a travel guide, so while it is a limitation, it’s the kind of limitation that fits the book rather than fights against it.
This one needs to be listened to. Ignacio Pecino specializes in procedurally generative audio: the sounds in this video are being generated in real-time from the cellular automata that he refers to as automata sonification.
The video has an overarching linear structure, defined by the particular patterns it starts with, but the moment-to-moment result is generated. In my terminology, it uses a closed progression system to give the video order, and an open, generative process to introduce meaningful chaos.
He has an online demo of audio generation with Conway’s Game of Life that yoiu can play around with: http://ignaciopecino.com/automata.html (Uses Unity, so Firefox works better than Chrome.)
Last May, Daniel Linssen made this pixel-art planet generator.
I like the way that it embraces the explorability of the generator. Each planet in the simulator is capable of supporting life, if you can find the right temperature to adjust it to. Adjusting the planetary parameters gives you more of an investment in the outcome, turning your browsing into an active search.
Global Game Jam is an annual world-wide game jam organized around a common theme. This year’s iteration took place this past weekend at 632 different sites, resulting in 6831 brand-new games made in 48 hours, (I made a card game.)
In addition to the theme, Global Game Jam includes extra goals called diversifiers. 399 of the games used the “To infinity and beyond” diversifier, which required using procedural generation in their games. Which means that there are now nearly four hundred new games in existence that use procedural generation than there were last week.
Game jams have become a part of the culture of indie game development, and many past success stories were originally made as jam games. A lot of the experimentation that pushes the artistic conversation forward comes out of them (plus it’s a great place to meet people who are also interested in making games).
I’ve mentionedCanabalt and how procedural generation helped create the new endless runner genre. The designer of Canabalt is one of several people working on Finji’s in-development Overland, which also uses procedural generation.
I found this video interesting because, not only does it discuss some behind-the-scenes details, but it also discusses some of the reasons why they’re using procedural generation in the first place.
Thinking about why you’re using procedural generation can go a long way to getting better results. In this case, thinking of the generator as a level designer clearly helped give the developers a vocabulary to discuss the goals and features they wanted to gain by using procedural generation.
Arcen Games is well known for pushing their game design into unusual and unexplored areas. Including their use of procedural generation.
Their most well-known game is the massive asymmetric RTS AI War, which does feature procedurally generated galaxy maps, but the game where they really went all-in on procedural generation isA Valley Without Wind, which they describe as a “procedural metroidvania with crafting”.
Not only is the open-world you explore procedurally generated, but the game adapts to your playing. The arc of the game is intentionally designed with the procedural generation of unending content in mind. Your exploration and your Terraria-esque city-building tie together in your quest to defeat the Overlord.
If you haven’t figured it out yet from my description, this is a ridiculously ambitious game. Procedural metroidvania is hard enough, butA Valley Without Wind also has a strategic layer, city-building elements, spell customization, and crafting. Plus it throws in co-op multiplayer.
The setting is a good example of picking a story to give context to the generator: the world has shattered, time has fractured, and now bits of different time periods are jumbled up together in a world that’s beset by an eternally-blowing wind. Any oddities in the generation are a presumably a side effect of the shattering.
The downside is that the setting takes a lot of exposure to cohere: in leaning hard into the limitations of the generator, it doesn’t quite give the solid sense of place that some other world generators manage. Giving a generator a context that emphasizes its randomness makes it harder to see the patterns that are there.
The infinite play arc is another dual-edged feature: the idea of recursive, iterative arcs is a very good structure, but having it be endless brings in some of the problems with infinity that I’ve talked about. Some players will be very excited with the idea of an indefinite campaign, but it’s a specific taste, not a universal one.
All in all, it’s an interesting case study in one way to approach a game that uses procedural generation for its foundation, with both pluses and minuses. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but at the same time there aren’t many games that attempt anything half as ambitious. It’s not a game for everyone, but there are some dedicated players who swear by it.
That flawed ambition lead to a mixed response and the eventual release ofA Valley Without Wind 2, now packaged together with 1, but that’s a story for another time…
While I’d like to see what interesting things you could build if you hooked this into something that used all of those adjectives intelligently, I also like clicking the generate button again and imagining what stories these characters have to tell.
While not all screensavers use procedural generation, screensavers are a great way to showcase a generative project, giving it a context.
Finding a way to contextualize your procedural generation project definitely helps people understand it more easily. I’d compare it to the way that people have an easier time understanding artwork in a gallery because it gives them a framework to start to interpret it. (Which is why some artists deliberately try to work outside a gallery space, because they’re critiquing that relationship.)
The hundred-and-twenty-plus entries in the jam show a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it’s time for the screensaver to be revived as an artform. The demoscene evolved out of the bragging of the early hacking and software piracy scenes. Perhaps the screensaver, vestigial in a post-phosphorus age, can find a similar niche.
Or maybe it’s already happened while I wasn’t looking. Is there a happy little community of After Dark enthusiasts I’ve never heard about, who compete to dazzle each other with new techniques? It wouldn’t surprise me. Out of all software, screensavers are perhaps the most afraid of human interaction. They’re timid mice that flee when they sense your approach. Perhaps their creators share similar traits.
The Mythic GM Emulator replaces GMs with d100s and d10s. Whenever you have any question, you can just roll the dice to get an answer, and then you interpret that answer to continue your story. Here’s a quick summary of the rules of the Mythic GM Emulator rules. There are severaldifferentimplementations of this program available online as well. Despite its name, the Mythic GM Emulator can also be used to represent players as well, as can be seen in this session report of someone using the GM Emulator to play a GMless game (Microscope).
The Mythic GM Emulator does produce surprisingly satisfying narratives, although that may be because a human had a role in shaping those narratives (by interpreting the output of the Emulator) and making sure that the narratives themselves make logical sense. But this system could serve as a possible roadmap for implementing Togelius’ dream of “actual AI” in gaming.
The Mythic GM Emulator is a famous tool within the “solo RPG” scene, but by no means the only one. Here’s a list of other systems and tools that can attempt to scratch your itch to play a tabletop game by yourself.
Submitted by Igor Horst
Thanks for the submission! I have to say, this overlaps strongly with my interests in interactive narrative. Using generative methods for solo play has a long history in roleplaying, and the wargaming it borrowed from. Clearly, that’s something that is still continuing.
