Mezzacotta

Mezzacotta is a website where The Comic Irregulars (who you might be familiar with via their other webcomic Darths & Droids) post their half-baked ideas. The centerpiece of the site is their first half-baked idea. Which also happens to be the longest running webcomic in existence, with archives that go back over nine trillion years.

There’s basically only one way to do that–and you’ve already read the name of this blog–so you probably already guessed what they’re doing. To help search out the ones that are actually funny, there’s a rating system and a list of the best baked comics. Some of them are actually rather funny. Or unsettlingly self-aware.

National Novel Generation Month

You’ve likely heard of National Novel Writing Month, where you attempt to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. But doesn’t your computer feel a bit left out? Why can’t your computer write a novel?

Enter NaNoGenMo. For the past two years, November has seen an eclectic collection of programmers get together and try to write a novel generator in a month. Progress updates (and the finished novels) are posted as issues on the  NaNoGenMo Github project.

If you’d like to look into text generation yourself, every year has a very useful resources thread: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/1

Last year’s repository: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014

RogueBasin is a wiki focused on roguelikes. There are a ton of tutorials and useful links if you want to make a roguelike, and a huge database of existing roguelikes if you want to play some.

Its also a regular place for new roguelike events to be announced, as well as new releases of roguelikes.

http://www.roguebasin.com/index.php?title=Main_Page

Dino Run SE (2011)

Escape the meteor-caused wave of doom by racing your dinosaur across procedurally generated prehistoric landscapes. Originally released online in 2008, Dino Run’s levels are different every time, though it also has a set of reused setpieces that give the levels structure.

Dino Run can be played online or in the Slightly Evolved downloadable edition which adds gameplay modes and can be played fullscreen.

Generating Magic cards using deep, recurrent neural networks

Once upon a time–by which I mean last week–a PhD candidate decided to feed the Magic: the Gathering card database into a neural network and see what cards it generated. This turned out to be successful (and hilarious).

The generator was instantly popular, and people started inserting the generated text into card templates. Someone even set up a Twitter account that outputs the cards from the generator.

There have been previous Magic-related generators, though they were based around Markov-chains and grammars, and so lacked the deep machine-learning flair of the neural network approach.

http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/creativity/custom-card-creation/612057-generating-magic-cards-using-deep-recurrent-neural

X@Com

It all comes back to roguelikes in the end.

Well, I don’t know if I’d consider X@Com that much of a roguelike, despite the ASCII, random maps, and permadeath, but I’m not really one to police the genre. The map randomization is pretty basic, but present, and even in its current alpha-ish state the game has several mods that add more map types and gameplay modes.

The development appears to mostly be on hold while the developer works on Cogmind instead. Which may be for the best: Cogmind has some very nice ASCII-rendered weapons.

http://xcomrl.blogspot.com/

UFO: Alien Invasion

UFO: Alien Invasion is an open-source X-Com-like that’s been in development for quite some time (and is one of the relatively few big open-source game projects that’s been playable for years). While it’s use of a heavily modified Quake 2 engine as a base has imposed a few feature restrictions, random maps are definitely supported. 

While the game world still has the concept of tiles, the large building blocks are actually constructed in a custom version of the Radiant map editor, and assembled dynamically in the game. Together with some fixed maps, this gives the game a fair amount of flexibility in the individual map layout, with regional variations in terrain and architecture, as is appropriate for a globe-spanning X-Com-like.

http://ufoai.org/wiki/News

UFO 2000

Continuing X-Com week, UFO 2000 is a multiplayer engine that can use the original graphics files for X-Com, or its entirely new set. The mission setup screen has a preview of the generated map, which gives a good overview of how X-Com style random map generation looks in practice, with the maps patched together from large, prefabbed blocks of times.

It has its own map sets and tiles, some of which work in the original game and some of which are entirely new. (There’s some overlap with OpenXcom, as you might expect, since the projects cross-pollinated.)

And, of course, it is open-source, so if you want to take a peek under the hood, you can.

http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net/

OpenXcom

OpenXcom is an open-source implementation of the original X-Com, capable of using the original data files from the game in a new-and-improved engine. It makes it much more playable, and most interestingly from our perspective, has fairly extensive mod support. Including new map types for the map generator. Some combine the original tiles sets in new ways, while others add entirely new tiles.

It requires a copy of the original game if you want to use the official graphics.

http://openxcom.org/

X-COM: UFO Defense / UFO: Enemy Unknown (1994)

X-Com was originally going to be a sequel to Laser Squad. The popularity of Civilization led MicroProse to suggest some changes, which eventually lead to X-Com being set on Earth with a strategic element. The original release actually had the geoscape and the battlescape as completely separate executables, but the actions in one half influenced the situation on the other side in significant ways. For example, shooting down a UFO made it crash-land, destroying its powerplant and weakening the aliens, but leaving fewer resources for your team to recover from the site.

This extended to the procedurally generated maps. Where Laser Squad had used a set of fixed missions, X-Com uses randomly generated maps to convey the feels of a global defense force. Each terrain type on the world map lead to a different kind of map in the tactical battles (plus the city terror missions). The maps are assembled from large pre-assembled blocks, most visible in the farm missions. Additionally, the cities have some simple rules to get streets and larger structures looking right. Because the UFO and X-Com landing craft can be placed anywhere on the tactical map, scouting is required to assess the tactical situation.

The other major factor for making the maps memorable is their destructibility and interactivity. While the only action your troops can really take to alter the map is shooting things, the various tiles on the map respond in expressive ways. Walls get knocked down, alien craft withstand grenades, and gas stations explode into flames. As your firepower and mobility increases with research, your experience of the tactical maps changes.