Welcome to Procedural Generation in Night Vale. Kate Compton’s entry in ProcJam 2014 used the popular drama podcast as inspiration for her template-based text generation.
Eternal Night Vale borrows the familiar structure of the show as framing for the generator, both overall and within each section. The generator’s source text imitates Cecil’s cadence and turns of phrase to seal the deal.
As the continuation of the Elite procedural generation legacy, Elite: Dangerous is of obvious interest. While I have some things to say specifically about the game’s current state, here’s a look behind the scenes at the planned future development of planetary surfaces in the upcoming Horizons season. Much of it is specific to this game, though if you’re working on your own planet generator you’ll undoubtedly get some inspiration.
Here’s the videos themselves, without the audio or the streaming glitches:
A newspaper of neverwas and mighthavebeen. A glimpse at life in a small town that trembles on the edge of existence. Another project by everest pipkin and loren schmidt.
Once upon a time, immigrant communities in America frequently had newspapers in the language of their home countries. This project feels like a vestige of that era, a small-town newspaper with lingering ties to an older, stranger era. Once foreign customs survive in turns of phrase imperfectly captured by the transcriber.
In my mind, the transcriber is an ethnographer who is in over her head, though it might equally be a machine trying to understand human behavior and being confounded by the not-quite-human inhabitants. But the overall tone isn’t quite Innsmouth or Night Vale; it feels closer to The Hidden Almanac.
The open world fighting genre has been a source of a lot of experiments in emergent gameplay. Last year’s Shadows of Mordor is a good example. Other people have explained the nemesis system in detail, so I’ll just summarize: any orc that kills you gets promoted to be a captain in Sauron’s army. If you kill them, they have a chance to come back, showing off their new procedurally applied scars. (Eventually you’ll either decapitate them or they’ll start wearing a sack over their head.)
Since any orc you encounter has the potential to become an important character in your game, they needed a way to make a lot of very distinct orcs on the fly. Enter procedural generation. The game has hundreds of procedurally generated orcs, any one of which might find his name being chanted as he deals you the killing blow. While you’ll tend to see patterns, there’s enough variety in the system that you’ll be most of the way through the game before you see all of the major possibilities, like the guy with a torch on his head, or the one who just grunts at you, or the singer, or the one who has a pet name for you.
The procedural generation gives the game a way to converse with you. Get killed by a lot of arrows and the captains’ ranks will start filling up with archers, each with his own generated strengths and weaknesses. Lose a fight to a captain and that captain will go up in rank.
It’s almost a pity you end up killing them, since there’s so few games that have managed to get you so emotionally invested in your relationships with randomly generated NPCs.
This guy right here is my nemesis. He keeps showing up, shooting me, calling me names and then leaving me for dead because he can’t be bothered to finish me off.
I’ve linked to Rune Skovbo Johansen’s blog before. This time rather than a tutorial, it’s a look at three approaches to procedural generation: simulation, functional, and planning.
It’s useful to consider the fundamental differences between algorithms. There’s no one best way to do procedural generation, and knowing the tradeoffs between your various options is an important part of making the best choices when you implement your procedural generation.
I think its important that the post highlights that the simulation approach doesn’t require you to simulate the exact thing you want for your result. Maybe your plate tectonic simulator can be re-purposed to also generate the fossa on Mars, or your cellular automaton can place the clouds over your city or the birds in the park.
Likewise, the functional approach has some really useful properties that comes from each sampled point being independent from the other points. This means that is can be calculated in real time and in parallel. The blog post also goes into a bunch of other considerations for choosing between the three approaches. Do go read it.
Can you think of examples of these different categories? What about approaches to procedural generation that don’t fall into these three categories? I’d love to hear any examples you can think of.
http://blog.runevision.com/2015/08/procedural-world-potentials-simulation.html
Well I have now. Most of my little tribes ignored me trying to send them across a desert to fertile lands, and I wasn’t quite clear on how best to use the terrain editing, but it did inspire thought of designing a Populous-like-sim.
Procedural generation in game jams is always a tricky decision. On the one hand it potentially allows you to create much more content than you would otherwise have been able to. On the other hand, it’s hard to test and guarantee results in that short amount of time, especially if you don’t have a lot of practice with the techniques you’re using.
If you, or anyone else, do have stories of successfully using procedural generation in your game jam games, do write and let me know. While I’ve played hundreds of Ludum Dare games, there are thousands more every jam that I don’t have time to try out!
I don’t remember how I came across it, but here’s an interesting little online procedural dungeon generator by Luis Eduardo Reis.
it’s apparently inspired by this dungeon generation article by Bob Nystrom, which helpfully includes source code if you want to try your hand at making your own maze-based dungeon generator.
Here’s a little city generator (by linekernel) turned into a freerunning parkour game. The building generator itself is quite interesting, capable of a rather large variety of details. Though some of those really narrow buildings would be at home in a film by Jacques Tati or Sylvain Chomet. There’s something distinctly French about the spaces it creates.
The freerunning part is mostly interesting to the extent that it gives the user a specific way to interact with the buildings. Their visual appeal becomes subsumed in finding a path to the hidden goal. As such, I think including the interaction is a success. While it does have its limitations as a game, it definitely gives the buildings more weight and presence than a simple visual observation would have. Still, for me sightseeing was a stronger draw than racing.
It’s worth contemplating other ways to present generated artifacts. Can you think of something that can let people feel the thing you’ve made in another way?
Originally created for the last ProcJam, the ProceduralToolkit is a collection of open-source tools for procedural generatiion in Unity. Available on GitHub or the Unity Asset Store, it includes quite a few examples of how to use it, including a chair generator, a building generator, and a terrain generator.