One of the defining features of the original 1994 X-COM / UFO: Enemy Unknown was its procedurally generated tactical battle maps. This was key to making the strategy game really feel global. Within the limitations of the generator it helped sell the idea of a grounded, world-spanning conflict.

Firaxis’ 2012 remake tries to do the same by providing a large selection of maps, but once you’ve played a couple of times you start seeing repeats, and some people have sunk hundreds hours into the game.

XCOM 2, on the other hand, looks like it’s being specifically designed from the ground up to use procedural generation in a big way. I’ll be looking forward to seeing if they can pull it off.

prostheticknowledge:

Shape Of The World

Procedurally generative gaming experience where world around you materializes as you wonder through it has just launched a Kickstarter campaign. The video below is simply a walkthrough, no voiceover or case from the developer why to invest in it, and it looks beautiful:

Shape of the World is an exploration game where a rich and colorful world grows around you. Your presence is the driving force behind the procedurally populated environment as you establish permanent monuments to mark your journey.

Shape of the World builds on the ideas of experiential games like Journey, Flower and Proteus where health hearts and kill points don’t enter the equation. It’s an evolving world that grows with each step and hints at distant landmarks, encouraging you to delve deeper into the woods. Shape of the World offers a unique unfolding experience for those seeking an alternative to quest-driven adventure games.

You can find out more at the Kickstarter page here, or the shapeoftheworld Tumblr blog here

This definitely looks interesting from a procedural angle.

Flow in Procedural Generation

More puzzle generation! This time, a presentation from PROCJAM 2014 by Tom Coxon about how the lock and key system in Lenna’s Inception helps the player achieve Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow state. A key part of level design is that levels should not be too frustrating or too boring. A puzzle generator that takes that into account can build a more effective structure for the entire game.

The Tom Coxton has released the basic dungeon puzzle sequencer as an open-source toolkit called Metazelda.

https://github.com/tcoxon/metazelda

Procedural Generation of Sokoban Levels

Here’s another approach to puzzle generation. A mechanical rather than narrative puzzle, to draw a distinction, operating in space rather than in logical connections between symbolic objects.

Sokoban and sokoban-like puzzles tend to crop up in other games that deal with space and movement on a grid. Nethack even has some special Sokoban levels. Being able to generate these kinds of puzzles procedurally could let us incorporate them into larger puzzle systems, allowing for greater variety.

Procedural Generation of Narrative Puzzles in Adventure Games: The Puzzle-Dice System

In this research paper by Clara Fernández-Vara and Alec Thomson, the authors discuss the system of procedural generation of puzzles used in Symon and Stranded in Singapore. Once they had the working design, they expanded it into what they call the Puzzle-Dice system.

The system works on a database of items that have relationships between each other (such as being able to be combined, or changing a property) and a set of puzzle building blocks. Using the relationships between the items, it attempts to connect the inputs to each puzzle with the other building blocks, building a tree of puzzles for the player to solve. Including taking into account gates between different rooms, giving the system a second way to sequence puzzles.

http://gambit.mit.edu/readme/papers/procedural-generation-of-narra-1.php#004993

Stranded in Singapore (2011)

Something of a followup to Symon, Stranded in Singapore is another attempt at procedurally generating adventure game puzzles.

The puzzle generator works with a set of building blocks that are used to construct a puzzle map, trying to connect each block with inputs generated from lists of other potential blocks.

Stranded in Singapore has more complex puzzle structures than Symon, with the puzzles themselves generally having logical relationships. Though the character motivations are a bit thin, which makes it less narratively engaging than Symon’s dreamscape. Then, too, narrative stakes are lower: tourism is a lighter subject than confronting regrets and mortality. 

I’d argue that the biggest difference is the way that the lore is used: the backstory implied by Symon’s objects is personal, bittersweet, and reflects the character’s past. The lore of the objects in Stranded entirely revolves around exploring Singapore’s real-world culture. Having the player character be a tourist limits his connection to the events, procedurally generated or not. He is just a window for exposition.

Procedural generation isn’t just about how you plug your algorithms together. The narrative context that you present the results within can have a significant effect on the player.

http://gambit.mit.edu/loadgame/stranded.php

Symon (2010)

Symon is a point-and-click adventure game with procedurally generated puzzles. Created by a team from the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, it is an experiment in replayability through procedural generation.

The story of the game is deliberately designed to support the limits of the procedural generation. Because the game takes place in dreams, the puzzles can be symbolic and the solutions can follow an odd dream-logic that fits well with the game’s setting. 

This is a prime example of how the story of a game is a critical part of its design: by establishing expectations for the player, the interactions in the game can work with the player’s questions about the game world, rather than against them. Choosing the right context to present your procedurally generated content in is an important part of the design of a game.

Abstract Ritual (2014)

Procedurally generated characters, procedurally generated conversations: these are unsolved problems. Strangethink’s neon powered alien world smashes right past that. This is a place that makes no secret of its hostility; you are the interloper in the logic of its inaccessible spaces.

And yet there is a logic. These aliens make sense to themselves. And though they resent your intrusion, they are reluctantly willing to explain the mystic significance of their monuments, pointing the way to the enlightenment of the secret world.

http://strangethink.itch.io/abstract-ritual

Quilt Bot

Like Pixel Sorter, @a_quilt_bot is a Twitter bot (created by bobpoekert​) that deals with images. But where Pixel Sorter directly sifts the individual pixels of the image, Quilt Bot is both more and less digital. More, because it uses a fairly complex algorithm to interpret the images. You could say that it understands the images in a deeper way. And less, because it patches together it’s version of your image out of quilting fabric.

https://twitter.com/a_quilt_bot

Meadows (2014)

Made for Procjam 2014, Meadows is an island of procedurally generated growing plants. Made by Tom Betts, who you might remember from In Ruins and Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

http://tomnullpointer.itch.io/meadows