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My co-founder and I were just looking at that game. Our startup is a game studio, and our focus is on procedurally generated content: environments, characters,

My co-founder and I were just looking at that game. Our startup is a game studio, and our focus is on procedurally generated content: environments, characters, narratives, graphics, even gameplay mechanics. It's a very exciting time for this sort of work, especially since the incumbents like EA and Activision can't pursue procedural generation as whole-heartidly as us independents.

Natsu 16y ago
While these games can be fun, you have to avoid the "empty universe" problem. Minecraft-like play, where you have a sandbox in which you create all sorts of crazy things is good, but for any game where you're trying to put a story in there, the sheer emptiness and banality of games where the content is spread too thinly will ruin the good parts of a game. Players are really good at spotting patterns, so you have to be careful of the drudgery of having them quest to kill X tribbles for $reason all the time. Anyhow, good luck with your game. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make good procedurally generated content that haven't been fully explored yet and I hope you find some of them :)
- Joakal 16y ago
  In borderlands, they generate content randomly: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Borderlands_%28video_game%29 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Borderlands_%... I gather games can be procedural by adding graphics and storylines. Simple missions like escort is easy with random positioning but complex linked ones can be created in tangent with name changes, speech style differences but encapsulating each quest part. Programming can largely go towards procedural generation. The best part is that if a procedural generation game can be encapsulated pretty well, it can be a different game by supplanting different content and stories. Lots of potential. IAAWG :)
  - Natsu 16y ago
    It's definitely a good idea to randomize parts of the game like that to make sure that it's a different experience for the player each time through. The usual problem with random quests is that they tend to become meaningless over time. I'm not saying it's always that way, but that's a very real trap people can fall into. The issue is that the player loses motivation after the Nth quest to kill X things for $reason. A better system would work to create a strong motive for the player to perform the quest. It could be as simple as the monster doing something to really piss the player off and making them want to go after it for revenge. But the problem is that you don't want to keep using the same tricks too often. If you can find a good way to combine N tricks into N! reasonable combinations, that's great, but every time you pull the same trick twice, you cheapen it a little, because players will see the patterns eventually. Seriously, there are crazy people who play games using spreadsheets to plot out exact damage formulas and stuff. I suspect those kids will grow up to be accountants :) Anyhow, my main point was that procedural generation is a very powerful and very cool tool, but it needs to be used to augment your game, not to dilute it. There's a temptation among some people out there to use it to avoid having to make any real content, which creates the "empty" feeling I spoke of before. I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for decades to come.
    - spiralganglion 16y ago
      >I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for decades to come. That'd be wonderful. The "empty" feeling of dilution, and the absence of real content, are issues our team are tackling head-on, with full awareness of such pitfalls. As an example, I was raised on the early Final Fantasy games. A huge, huge part of their appeal was the music — beautiful themes with expert execution by a masterful composer (Nobuo Uematsu). Even now, 20 years later, I have friends who grew up playing the same games who still remember the music. We can hum the themes to one-another, and reminisce about our youth beguiling away many an afternoon absorbed in the stories of these virtual worlds. But if the stories were procedurally generated, or the music, or any other "hook" that will be remembered by the player, the shared experience is suddenly lost. People may play the same "title", but they haven't played the same game. This is a big, big challenge — how do you leverage the power of dynamically generated content, without breaking the consistency of experience within your game and the commonality of experience between players. How do you create shared memories? It's easy enough to take a game like Diablo, where the maps are random, or Boarderlands, where the weapons are random, and discuss the game with someone else, arriving at a shared impression and similar memories of play. But if the maps, weapons, quests, characters, sounds, music, rendering style, dialogue, plot, gameplay rules, setting, and even game genre are in some way "generated"... how can you still have a shared experience? Whoever comes out with a solution to that will be doing some fascinating work. Also, from what I've heard, the next Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion) game is going to have some aspect of procedurally determined quests. I'm excited to see how they do that, as it's not so often that a big studio like Bethesda takes on such an unproven concept.
      - Natsu 16y ago
        Because of your reminder, I'm listening to the FF6 opera right now in my mind, even though I haven't heard it for years. (Celes: "Oh my hero, so far away now, will I ever see your smile? Like night into day, you're so far away, it's just a fading dream."), so I understand what you mean very well about shared experiences and the like. It sounds like you understand the weak points of procedural generation quite well, so I think you'll be able to use it to full effect and create a great game. Good luck! :)
- spiralganglion 16y ago
  We've got a few games in the pipe, and none of them are open-world. It's a common assumption that games with some procedural aspect come out as sprawling "canvases" for free-form play — that you'll be stuck in the sandbox if you want to play with procedural environments. Where in fact, our game currently in active development has a tiny environment. You can see the whole thing on one screen, with your character occupying about 1% of the area. The environment is continuously procedurally generated as the game is running, constantly shifting and changing without really expanding, per se. The player's reaction to their ever-changing surroundings is a big part of the fun. The gameplay is rooted in kinetic action, where spacial relationships are manipulated by the player. It's an arcade-style game, with the player's character pitted against a screenful of enemies. Attacks don't cause damage as much as create movement, and it's the movement of the character and enemies with respect to the (somewhat predictably) shifting environment that creates the flow of gameplay. I'd be more specific, but we're not quite ready to reveal the whole concept. It's quite a bit different than anything we've seen before, so we're being careful about having the product ready to launch before we start showing off the more unusual and exciting qualities. In addition to procedurally generated, constantly evolving environments.. we've got procedurally re-composed music (my background is in algorithmic music composition). Re-composed, meaning the music is based on human-written themes, but the arrangements are done in realtime by the computer. We're also playing with procedural generation of enemies, to create a lot of variety with relatively little effort. That is, they'll look and behave differently depending on the outcome of the procedural generation.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    Just out of curiosity, where can I find out about your game? I clicked around your profile & portfolio links, but I can't even find out the name of it, unless it's there and I'm just not recognizing it. You have me curious.
    - spiralganglion 16y ago
      It's our first title as a new startup, so we don't even have a company website yet. We're going to finish it up early in march, publish it through a few platforms, and then launch the website and do our promotional stuff to coincide with public availability. Soon, soon. If there's anything specific you'd like to know I'd be happy to email you about it, or notify you when we release it. If you want to email me, you can use this address: spiral@ganglion.ca

Natsu 16y ago

While these games can be fun, you have to avoid the "empty universe" problem. Minecraft-like play, where you have a sandbox in which you create all sorts of crazy things is good, but for any game where you're trying to put a story in there, the sheer emptiness and banality of games where the content is spread too thinly will ruin the good parts of a game. Players are really good at spotting patterns, so you have to be careful of the drudgery of having them quest to kill X tribbles for $reason all the time. Anyhow, good luck with your game. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to make good procedurally generated content that haven't been fully explored yet and I hope you find some of them :)

Joakal 16y ago
In borderlands, they generate content randomly: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Borderlands_%28video_game%29 https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Borderlands_%... I gather games can be procedural by adding graphics and storylines. Simple missions like escort is easy with random positioning but complex linked ones can be created in tangent with name changes, speech style differences but encapsulating each quest part. Programming can largely go towards procedural generation. The best part is that if a procedural generation game can be encapsulated pretty well, it can be a different game by supplanting different content and stories. Lots of potential. IAAWG :)
- Natsu 16y ago
  It's definitely a good idea to randomize parts of the game like that to make sure that it's a different experience for the player each time through. The usual problem with random quests is that they tend to become meaningless over time. I'm not saying it's always that way, but that's a very real trap people can fall into. The issue is that the player loses motivation after the Nth quest to kill X things for $reason. A better system would work to create a strong motive for the player to perform the quest. It could be as simple as the monster doing something to really piss the player off and making them want to go after it for revenge. But the problem is that you don't want to keep using the same tricks too often. If you can find a good way to combine N tricks into N! reasonable combinations, that's great, but every time you pull the same trick twice, you cheapen it a little, because players will see the patterns eventually. Seriously, there are crazy people who play games using spreadsheets to plot out exact damage formulas and stuff. I suspect those kids will grow up to be accountants :) Anyhow, my main point was that procedural generation is a very powerful and very cool tool, but it needs to be used to augment your game, not to dilute it. There's a temptation among some people out there to use it to avoid having to make any real content, which creates the "empty" feeling I spoke of before. I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for decades to come.
  - spiralganglion 16y ago
    >I believe that the people who avoid that temptation and create undiluted games with procedurally generated content will be the ones whose games are played for decades to come. That'd be wonderful. The "empty" feeling of dilution, and the absence of real content, are issues our team are tackling head-on, with full awareness of such pitfalls. As an example, I was raised on the early Final Fantasy games. A huge, huge part of their appeal was the music — beautiful themes with expert execution by a masterful composer (Nobuo Uematsu). Even now, 20 years later, I have friends who grew up playing the same games who still remember the music. We can hum the themes to one-another, and reminisce about our youth beguiling away many an afternoon absorbed in the stories of these virtual worlds. But if the stories were procedurally generated, or the music, or any other "hook" that will be remembered by the player, the shared experience is suddenly lost. People may play the same "title", but they haven't played the same game. This is a big, big challenge — how do you leverage the power of dynamically generated content, without breaking the consistency of experience within your game and the commonality of experience between players. How do you create shared memories? It's easy enough to take a game like Diablo, where the maps are random, or Boarderlands, where the weapons are random, and discuss the game with someone else, arriving at a shared impression and similar memories of play. But if the maps, weapons, quests, characters, sounds, music, rendering style, dialogue, plot, gameplay rules, setting, and even game genre are in some way "generated"... how can you still have a shared experience? Whoever comes out with a solution to that will be doing some fascinating work. Also, from what I've heard, the next Elder Scrolls (Morrowind, Oblivion) game is going to have some aspect of procedurally determined quests. I'm excited to see how they do that, as it's not so often that a big studio like Bethesda takes on such an unproven concept.
    - Natsu 16y ago
      Because of your reminder, I'm listening to the FF6 opera right now in my mind, even though I haven't heard it for years. (Celes: "Oh my hero, so far away now, will I ever see your smile? Like night into day, you're so far away, it's just a fading dream."), so I understand what you mean very well about shared experiences and the like. It sounds like you understand the weak points of procedural generation quite well, so I think you'll be able to use it to full effect and create a great game. Good luck! :)
spiralganglion 16y ago
We've got a few games in the pipe, and none of them are open-world. It's a common assumption that games with some procedural aspect come out as sprawling "canvases" for free-form play — that you'll be stuck in the sandbox if you want to play with procedural environments. Where in fact, our game currently in active development has a tiny environment. You can see the whole thing on one screen, with your character occupying about 1% of the area. The environment is continuously procedurally generated as the game is running, constantly shifting and changing without really expanding, per se. The player's reaction to their ever-changing surroundings is a big part of the fun. The gameplay is rooted in kinetic action, where spacial relationships are manipulated by the player. It's an arcade-style game, with the player's character pitted against a screenful of enemies. Attacks don't cause damage as much as create movement, and it's the movement of the character and enemies with respect to the (somewhat predictably) shifting environment that creates the flow of gameplay. I'd be more specific, but we're not quite ready to reveal the whole concept. It's quite a bit different than anything we've seen before, so we're being careful about having the product ready to launch before we start showing off the more unusual and exciting qualities. In addition to procedurally generated, constantly evolving environments.. we've got procedurally re-composed music (my background is in algorithmic music composition). Re-composed, meaning the music is based on human-written themes, but the arrangements are done in realtime by the computer. We're also playing with procedural generation of enemies, to create a lot of variety with relatively little effort. That is, they'll look and behave differently depending on the outcome of the procedural generation.
- Natsu 16y ago
  Just out of curiosity, where can I find out about your game? I clicked around your profile & portfolio links, but I can't even find out the name of it, unless it's there and I'm just not recognizing it. You have me curious.
  - spiralganglion 16y ago
    It's our first title as a new startup, so we don't even have a company website yet. We're going to finish it up early in march, publish it through a few platforms, and then launch the website and do our promotional stuff to coincide with public availability. Soon, soon. If there's anything specific you'd like to know I'd be happy to email you about it, or notify you when we release it. If you want to email me, you can use this address: spiral@ganglion.ca