8 ms·

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough

A big name in proc gen is Kate Compton who coined the term "10,000 bowls of oatmeal" to describe this phenomenon of technically unique but not different enough to matter - I googled "10000 bowls of oatmeal" to see if there was a good article and the second link was about it and nms https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowls-of-plain-oatmeal/ https://www.challies.com/articles/no-mans-sky-and-10000-bowl...

meowface 22d ago
One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.
- nemomarx 22d ago
  You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?
  - OkayPhysicist 22d ago
    IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay. The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot. In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
    - WhatIsDukkha 22d ago
      If your proceduralism doesn't generate easy to hard solvable problems (ie from geometry constraints etc), its not really adding to the gameplay, only the visual experience.
    - nemomarx 22d ago
      I'm thinking of the generated history and legends too - NMS only seems to gesture at this with wrecks of ships but I don't think it actually gives each planet a history.
- rcxdude 22d ago
  The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare. 1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
  - feoren 22d ago
    > 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
    - rcxdude 22d ago
      I mean, almost no games have that many meaningful dimensions in the first place. It's more likely that the correlations you add just reduce the potential for interesting combinations to arise in the first place.
    - schnevets 22d ago
      Agreed. Elsewhere in this conversation people mention simple games that procgen well: Spelunky, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup These are games painting with a 16 color palette while the technology exists for any shade in RGB. The more variations, the less likely things will be coherent (let alone brilliant)
    - vintermann 22d ago
      Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky. This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake. Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.
- mostly_harmless 22d ago
  Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen. Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze. Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
- kettlecorn 22d ago
  I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player. As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting. Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere. When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator. The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
  - meowface 21d ago
    Very good points. Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians? (I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)
    - kettlecorn 21d ago
      I'm far outside the music creation space so you're basically asking me to spitball something, but I'll try! I think "make it observable" is a good principle for a lot of software, but also is useful here. Like if you have something changing in how it operates think about perceptual clues that are unobtrusive but give the user a sense of what's going on. Think a car engine sounding weird, a laptop getting hot, or a water bottle being filled up rising in pitch. Being able to rapidly clue in to how something is running in a bunch of different ways is useful. In synth plugin systems I've seen with node graphs I think having some sort of perception of data traveling that you can assess at a glance could be useful. I can see both color and perhaps the "texture" (dotted, dashed, etc.) of the connections being mapped to some important property of what's being transmitted. On the "cross interactions" thing perhaps there's a design opportunity to find interesting properties of different components you wouldn't normally expose that you can feed into other systems. Perhaps if audio were to clip that is both something you don't want but also a control signal that can feed into something that self-corrects, or even entirely changes the composition. With that you might have some sort of dynamic gain that as it approaches clipping it steps into a new composition creating a strange "ecosystem" of sound. In general there's some interesting opportunities to try to create real systemic components that try to make mechanisms with interesting properties rather than precisely controlled things. Perhaps you add an input that pulls the current moon phase, astrological signs, time of day, or weather. Then your composition could change and be a sort of live work each time, but not in a totally arbitrary way. If you wanted to extend the idea of "observability" all the way to the user you could by convention add some brief narration at the start describing the conditions of the composition "It is Wednesday. Rain is forecasted. The following composition has been changed accordingly." It also may be interesting to weave in more sophisticated mathematical systems, or physics simulations, and then feed them into other components. It'd be quite odd but I can imagine like a bunch of balls on ice floating around and when they touch that creates a signal output, but you could have an input that's like "table shake". It'd be fun to see a program triggering these sort of rube goldberg-esque chain of things to create some sort of interesting sound scape. No idea if that's helpful!
- setr 22d ago
  Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself) 1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency. 2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game. 3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result. 4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not. 5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice. 6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses) 7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too) 8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables. 9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables. 10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing. 11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath. 12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath. 13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools). 14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.
- nkrisc 22d ago
  Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety. If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different. Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.
  - rmunn 22d ago
    > It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2). My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!? Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop: - Fly around looking for planets with valuable minerals - Land, scoop up what you can carry, fly home to sell them - Gradually increase your ship's capabilities Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to: - Collect plot-important artifacts, fly home to get them researched - Research tells you "go talk to these aliens". - Do a fetch quest so they like you, then talk to them. - They tell you where to go to kick off the next plot point. After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to: - Find out where the Big Bad's home base is - Find out where the MacGuffin is that lets you access that location - Take MacGuffin to right place, fight Big Bad, save the day. Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't need to do much mining anymore. You might land when you spotted a target of opportunity — "Oh look, scanners say big pile of platinum just sitting there on a nearby planet, let's make a small detour" — but that was just to keep the bank account topped off. You could afford enough fuel to fly all the way across the map and back, so you could focus on the story. And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day. Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters. But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well. P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.
- vuvko 21d ago
  The Tumblr post[0] by Kate Compton makes a good example of how to build a generator with meaningful outcomes. You start by writing down good examples you want your generator to have and bad examples you want to avoid. That will both be a kind of filtering test and a structure to build from. You can create different metrics and numbers to guide the generator, but every number loses meaning once you decouple it from human feedback in games. [0]: https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want...
kjs3 22d ago
That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.
- scotty79 22d ago
  That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.
- glenstein 22d ago
  I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point. Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder. I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
  - k4j8 22d ago
    The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.
    - peheje 22d ago
      one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
    - benterris 22d ago
smugglerFlynn 22d ago
> you must ask yourself a single tough question: > How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design? This quote applies to so much more than just gaming
schnevets 22d ago
I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work. The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
- analog8374 22d ago
  I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm. In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.
- patagurbon 21d ago
  By the end of it's lifetime Bungie had created quite a bit of variety in the Destiny 2 content library (although there's always a bit of orb dunking, plate standing, and symbol reading). And if they hadn't rebuilt the engine from scratch it would've been even bigger. There's like 30+ strikes, ~8 pinnacle ops/exotic missions, 11 dungeons, 10 raids, and many campaigns. But more to the point of the original comment: it's quite engaging to spend an hour or two a week mastering one of those missions at the hardest difficulty. The modern difficulty knobs are really neat and complement the immensely fun gameplay loop very well. NMS, unfortunately, has no real enjoyable gameplay loop. We are still years off of an LLM creating a gameplay system even 1/4 as good as Destiny IMHO.
EagnaIonat 22d ago
That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.
- cwillu 22d ago
  And yet it was posted as a reply to someone saying that it still feels like oatmeal.
ratelimitsteve 22d ago
even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
fxwin 22d ago
I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)
- ghostly_s 22d ago
  Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.
  - jasonjmcghee 22d ago
    The original massive controversy was the founder of the studio claiming it had multiplayer when it very clearly didn't which was such an odd thing to claim and easy to prove false. That and the trailer was very different than the released game. They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game
- belval 22d ago
  I played it in VR and it still does. No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world. Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.
- vintermann 22d ago
  They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests. The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.
metadat 22d ago
Totally agree. But I'm still wondering why was Escape Velocity so fun yet NMS is a nothing burger? They are very similar, except EV was goofier.
LarsDu88 22d ago
This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.
an0malous 22d ago
> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless. Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.
- wvenable 22d ago
  I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.
  - matheusmoreira 22d ago
    That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.
    - fallingbananna 21d ago
      The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things. In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship. The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.
      - Pifanjr 21d ago
        I made this point earlier in the comments, but I think the main difference between Minecraft and No Man's Sky is that Minecraft does not push the players towards specific gameplay systems, while No Man's Sky does, making No Man's Sky feel much less like a box of legos and more like a collection of specific tasks/activities.
    - Ekaros 21d ago
pigpop 21d ago
I think it's very important to distinguish procedural generation as only one component required for emergent, unpredictable gameplay. If you lean on it too heavily then yes, you will just have 10,000 variations on plain oatmeal. The other ingredients that go on top of procedural generation are what gives it flavour (to torture the metaphor a bit). The next step after proc gen should be physical simulation, systems like erosion, continental drift, insolation, volcanism, etc. will produce much more interesting terrain. Several more layers of simulation can be added depending on the game but for a game like NMS an evolution system and a goal oriented AI behaviour simulation would be appropriate perhaps with some kind of history and population simulation for artifacts and colonies. The problem with adding simulation is that it's computationally expensive. There are ways you could disguise the loading times, especially in a game with space travel, such as travel times required to reach new star systems but anything that runs in real time like animal or NPC behaviour is a hard problem to solve. Dwarf Fortress is the paragon of this that everyone points to, for good reason, but Dark Days Ahead is also a good example. I'd like to see something equivalent done for a sci-fi space travel game but I'm not aware of any truly successful attempts.
- JTbane 21d ago
  There are some amazing examples of procedural generation though, such as Minecraft terrain and the orcs from Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.
urbandw311er 21d ago
I would say that the antithesis of this would be something like the Zelda Breath of the Wild. Sure, it doesn’t have the far reaching “million planets in a galaxy” thing going on, but it’s still vast for the purposes of being able to wander around for days. And, as you are discovering new towns, hills, fields, woods, cliffs and so on, it never begins to feel dull or repetitive. Because pretty much every inch of that map has been handcrafted by a team of dedicated humans. Obsessed with making it beautiful, perfect, varied and interesting throughout.

meowface 22d ago

One thing this article lacks is any tips on how to still do procedural generation while partly mitigating the oatmeal issue. In other words, define a more sophisticated generation procedure that can add character and identity. It probably won't be as good as an artful human designer hand-crafting a world, but it can be better than something overly random and blandly uniform in distribution.

nemomarx 22d ago
You want to look at dwarf fortress talks for that, I think?
- OkayPhysicist 22d ago
  IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay. The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot. In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.
  - WhatIsDukkha 22d ago
    If your proceduralism doesn't generate easy to hard solvable problems (ie from geometry constraints etc), its not really adding to the gameplay, only the visual experience.
  - nemomarx 22d ago
    I'm thinking of the generated history and legends too - NMS only seems to gesture at this with wrecks of ships but I don't think it actually gives each planet a history.
rcxdude 22d ago
The advice I've heard is 1) have as many different dimensions of variation as you can manage, and try to have them matter, 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation, since this just reduces variety, and 3) allow your parameters to become extreme occasionally, so that some parts of your generation are notably different, and special because they're rare. 1) is the really hard part, I think: it's a challenge to come up with enough meaningful variations that also work from a gameplay point of view.
- feoren 22d ago
  > 2) resist the urge to impart correlations into the generation I think the opposite. The more dimensions you have, the more "invalid space" there should be. Otherwise you end up with giant dinosaurs with tiny feet and fairy wings. You end up with a yellow kitchen with a barrel full of arrows next to a blue dungeon with a giant dresser. You end up with nothing making sense, and everything feeling random in the same way. Trying to spot the differences between 100100111101011110110001001011101 and 1101101110111010000100111001011101 is exactly the "bowl of oatmeal" problem. The vast majority of possible combinations of values should be invalid and impossible, otherwise the choices actually don't matter.
  - rcxdude 22d ago
    I mean, almost no games have that many meaningful dimensions in the first place. It's more likely that the correlations you add just reduce the potential for interesting combinations to arise in the first place.
  - schnevets 22d ago
    Agreed. Elsewhere in this conversation people mention simple games that procgen well: Spelunky, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup These are games painting with a 16 color palette while the technology exists for any shade in RGB. The more variations, the less likely things will be coherent (let alone brilliant)
  - vintermann 22d ago
    Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky. This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake. Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.
mostly_harmless 22d ago
Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen. Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze. Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
kettlecorn 22d ago
I've thought about it a bunch over the years and my advice is to follow a few principles: procedural elements should almost always impact how the player plays, procedural elements should cross-interact with each other as much as possible, and procedural elements should be understandable to the player. As an example in No Man's Sky the player immediately starts with a jetpack. It makes it so the terrain is approached the same way every time: you just jetpack over it. Very rarely something is tall enough to require you to walk around. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a positive counter example. You have stamina so you're constantly thinking about the height of cliff faces, you can glide so you're thinking about height points and straight lines through the world, cliff faces cannot be climbed in rain so you think about the weather, slopes can be slid down on a shield, etc. There are a bunch of systems that may you think about the topology of the terrain, so even just varying the height map becomes interesting. Similarly in No Man's Sky there are different resources but they work the same way on each planet and the player interacts with them pretty much the same way everywhere. When I say elements should be "understandable" what I mean is that a trap, which Dwarf Fortress falls into, is to add a vast simulation which the player feels they can never really grasp. Simulations should not be a black box because then they begin to feel like a random number generator. The aim shouldn't be to make an "infinite" game but to make a very interesting system for the player to slowly understand and master. The developer shouldn't just add stuff, but they should think about the long journey (and eventual mastery) a player might take as they spend significant time with the systems.
- meowface 21d ago
  Very good points. Weird question: do you have any tips on how one might apply these principles to a semi-stochastic synth plugin for musicians? (I have several ideas, but I'd be curious to hear yours, independently.)
  - kettlecorn 21d ago
    I'm far outside the music creation space so you're basically asking me to spitball something, but I'll try! I think "make it observable" is a good principle for a lot of software, but also is useful here. Like if you have something changing in how it operates think about perceptual clues that are unobtrusive but give the user a sense of what's going on. Think a car engine sounding weird, a laptop getting hot, or a water bottle being filled up rising in pitch. Being able to rapidly clue in to how something is running in a bunch of different ways is useful. In synth plugin systems I've seen with node graphs I think having some sort of perception of data traveling that you can assess at a glance could be useful. I can see both color and perhaps the "texture" (dotted, dashed, etc.) of the connections being mapped to some important property of what's being transmitted. On the "cross interactions" thing perhaps there's a design opportunity to find interesting properties of different components you wouldn't normally expose that you can feed into other systems. Perhaps if audio were to clip that is both something you don't want but also a control signal that can feed into something that self-corrects, or even entirely changes the composition. With that you might have some sort of dynamic gain that as it approaches clipping it steps into a new composition creating a strange "ecosystem" of sound. In general there's some interesting opportunities to try to create real systemic components that try to make mechanisms with interesting properties rather than precisely controlled things. Perhaps you add an input that pulls the current moon phase, astrological signs, time of day, or weather. Then your composition could change and be a sort of live work each time, but not in a totally arbitrary way. If you wanted to extend the idea of "observability" all the way to the user you could by convention add some brief narration at the start describing the conditions of the composition "It is Wednesday. Rain is forecasted. The following composition has been changed accordingly." It also may be interesting to weave in more sophisticated mathematical systems, or physics simulations, and then feed them into other components. It'd be quite odd but I can imagine like a bunch of balls on ice floating around and when they touch that creates a signal output, but you could have an input that's like "table shake". It'd be fun to see a program triggering these sort of rube goldberg-esque chain of things to create some sort of interesting sound scape. No idea if that's helpful!
setr 22d ago
Roguelikes are the ultimate in procgen technology, and should be the basis of any design. (DF is the ultimate simulation but uses procgen as a tool to achieve it; a different vein than NMS trying to explore the procgen and its direct outcomes itself) 1. Any imaginary world needs to be internally consistent to be interesting. Procgen does not void this rule; randomization needs to be gated to that internal consistency. 2. A world can be composed of multiple environments, and each environment can a different definition of internal consistency. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this very openly and to fairly good effect, but pretty much any decent procgen game will inevitably end up with the same choice, because it's what enables you to play with various procgen systems/rules while still having a coherent overall game. 3. Generalizing 2, procgen systems generally do not start from nothing; You embed reasonably well-defined bases (races, weapon forms, etc) and then apply randomization on top of those bases to form the final element. Meaningful fundamental variation in those bases leads to guaranteed meaningful variation in the end result. 4. Games are fundamentally interactive systems. Generating a thousand variations without actually changing interaction is equivalent to generating exactly one variation. A blue orc vs a red orc is a not real variant, unless you make it so by attaching effects / statuses / capabilities. The color distinction is then a signal into the more abstracted changes that have occurred. This is where NMS falls over -- the images have changed, but the interaction has not. 5. A corollary to point 4, changing numbers without changing interaction is equivalent to doing nothing. If a meaningful damage threshold is functionally every 10 points of damage, then generating numbers 0-9, 11-19, etc is equivalent to generating just the numbers 0 and 10. This is where borderlands falls over -- a million variations in guns, but the vast majority of those variations are just numeric differences that don't change anything in practice. 6. If the procgen applies to equipment/builds, you pretty much need permadeath as a driver for exploring a procgen game and its systems, because you need players to explore for a local optima. Exploring the space for a global optima in a procgen game inevitably devolves into a gambling simulator, because players optimize out the fun, and the optimal play is to the kill unit XYZ repeatedly for the 0.5% drop. Games like Terraria fall into this trap (though Terraria resolves it mostly by making unit XYZ be trivially summon-able bosses) 7. Procgen can never guarantee interesting results; You inevitably need a system of vaults/artifacts -- hardcoded quality items -- to guarantee periodic interesting locations/items. Ideally more notable than average generation, but less than strictly optimal so as to not overpower the other systems -- an issue I've had with games like Diablo 3, where finding an item-set was vastly more powerful than anything else that I acquired for the next 5+ hours, eliminating the entire looting system (and even character skill system, since it forced my build too) 8. Decent Procgen is inevitably rule-based, with possibly multiple chained-rules each doing their own rolls, to ensure coherency. Ideally the rule-chain is roughly discoverable from the end results (by virtue of following internally consistent and apparent rules) -- an end-result that cannot be explained is indistinguishable from pure-random, and pure-random in incoherent. See any Tabletop RPG generation tables. 9. Hell, just start any procgen design from tabletop RPG tables. 10. The number of variations that can be produced is meaningless. This is only for marketing. 11. A procedural system that generates exactly once is fairly pointless. Permadeath. 12. A procedural system is inherently unfair, because you cannot guarantee difficulty, proper placement, unit composition, etc without removing the procedural systems outright. Embrace the unfairness, and design around it. Permadeath. 13. A procedural system is inherently unfair; you need to give some guaranteed items with guaranteed results to navigate an uncertain world (e.g. escape tools). 14. It's always good to enable some control by the player over the procedural generation. Choice of environments, chances at additional loot, etc. You want the player to engage with procgen rules, because they're interesting (and if they're not, what are you doing?), and the easiest way is to give them tools to manipulate it to their advantage. Also permadeath.
nkrisc 22d ago
Procedural generation is not gameplay. Procedural generation makes your already fun game more interesting via more variety. If you don’t already have a fun game, then pro gen won’t make it any more fun than it already is. It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. If every single Minecraft player loaded into only a single Minecraft world, it would still be as fun as it is. Would No Man’s Sky really be that much different if it just shipped with a handful of pre-defined planets? It might have less replay value but the gameplay wouldn’t be any different. Good proc gen changes things in your game such that the player is given interesting reasons to make different choices each time they play.
- rmunn 22d ago
  > It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game. First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2). My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!? Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop: - Fly around looking for planets with valuable minerals - Land, scoop up what you can carry, fly home to sell them - Gradually increase your ship's capabilities Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to: - Collect plot-important artifacts, fly home to get them researched - Research tells you "go talk to these aliens". - Do a fetch quest so they like you, then talk to them. - They tell you where to go to kick off the next plot point. After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to: - Find out where the Big Bad's home base is - Find out where the MacGuffin is that lets you access that location - Take MacGuffin to right place, fight Big Bad, save the day. Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't need to do much mining anymore. You might land when you spotted a target of opportunity — "Oh look, scanners say big pile of platinum just sitting there on a nearby planet, let's make a small detour" — but that was just to keep the bank account topped off. You could afford enough fuel to fly all the way across the map and back, so you could focus on the story. And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day. Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters. But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well. P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.
vuvko 21d ago
The Tumblr post[0] by Kate Compton makes a good example of how to build a generator with meaningful outcomes. You start by writing down good examples you want your generator to have and bad examples you want to avoid. That will both be a kind of filtering test and a structure to build from. You can create different metrics and numbers to guide the generator, but every number loses meaning once you decouple it from human feedback in games. [0]: https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want-to-build-a-generator https://galaxykate0.tumblr.com/post/139774965871/so-you-want...

kjs3 22d ago

That's pretty much the perfect description of NMS. Every planet is 'different', every site on the planets are 'different', but not different in any meaningful way. Oh look...this planet has 4 legged animals that are green and bumpy and the last one they were brown and spiky...but they move the same and act the same. Yawn.

scotty79 22d ago
That's funny because that's exactly what I feel when I travel IRL.
glenstein 22d ago
I still think it's a remarkable success story and they can and should be incredibly proud of what they've built. But this vision of what is meant by cosmic depth and expansiveness seems to tragically miss the point. Compare it to even our own solar system where even so much as a new high-res photo of the hexagon storm on Saturn comes with stunning new and specific detail, or the "heart" on Pluto, we're practically ambushed with novel configurations of atmospheric dynamics and geology. It's frustratingly rare for games to truly activate that feeling of wonder. I think NMS is still an unbeatable deal for what it is as a game but it's a frustrating near miss flyby of what I think people want a true space exploration game to feel like.
- k4j8 22d ago
  The best space exploration game I've played is Outer Wilds (https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/), but instead of the NMS sandbox there are puzzles.
  - peheje 22d ago
    one of those games where i wish i could erase my memory just to play it again, still think about it, i think it's like a year ago i played it, maybe more. idk. great game.
  - benterris 22d ago

smugglerFlynn 22d ago

> you must ask yourself a single tough question: > How much do you value technological wonder over everyday, solid, smart game design? This quote applies to so much more than just gaming

schnevets 22d ago

I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work. The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)

analog8374 22d ago
I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm. In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.
patagurbon 21d ago
By the end of it's lifetime Bungie had created quite a bit of variety in the Destiny 2 content library (although there's always a bit of orb dunking, plate standing, and symbol reading). And if they hadn't rebuilt the engine from scratch it would've been even bigger. There's like 30+ strikes, ~8 pinnacle ops/exotic missions, 11 dungeons, 10 raids, and many campaigns. But more to the point of the original comment: it's quite engaging to spend an hour or two a week mastering one of those missions at the hardest difficulty. The modern difficulty knobs are really neat and complement the immensely fun gameplay loop very well. NMS, unfortunately, has no real enjoyable gameplay loop. We are still years off of an LLM creating a gameplay system even 1/4 as good as Destiny IMHO.

EagnaIonat 22d ago

That article is 10 years old. NMS then versus now are two very different games.

cwillu 22d ago
And yet it was posted as a reply to someone saying that it still feels like oatmeal.

ratelimitsteve 22d ago

even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.

fxwin 22d ago

I haven't played it myself, but surely an article written one month after the game's release doesn't do it justice, considering there have been multiple major updates attempting to address the gripes players initially had with the game in the 10 years since then (And review trends on steam indicate that these attempts were successful)

ghostly_s 22d ago
Indeed, I remember it being pilloried after release but the Steam reviews now are generally quite positive from players who've logged tons of hours.
- jasonjmcghee 22d ago
  The original massive controversy was the founder of the studio claiming it had multiplayer when it very clearly didn't which was such an odd thing to claim and easy to prove false. That and the trailer was very different than the released game. They apologized IIRC and then continued to work on it for like a decade - adding multiplayer and many large changes to the game
belval 22d ago
I played it in VR and it still does. No Man's Sky suffers from planets being "deserts", they have different attributes but it's still a fairly lifeless empty world. Ironically this is realistic but also not terribly fun as a player.
vintermann 22d ago
They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests. The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.

metadat 22d ago

Totally agree. But I'm still wondering why was Escape Velocity so fun yet NMS is a nothing burger? They are very similar, except EV was goofier.

LarsDu88 22d ago

This is something I realized about game design: if you have a procedurally generated world like XCOM, almost every playthrough (or "dungeon") has to produce something new to the player. Something like 10% of each run should actually have something new and unique. That's what makes games like Enter the Gungeon and XCOM 2 work and games like early No Man's Sky fail.

an0malous 22d ago

> A procedural universe may be technically impressive but it is also bland, empty, purposeless. Why doesn't this apply to Minecraft? People love Minecraft even though it's equally purposeless and arguably bland and empty.

wvenable 22d ago
I think because the Minecraft world is like a giant tub of Lego. You go out into the procedural world to collect your pieces and then you create from that. It's actually your creations that are interesting and without them Minecraft would equally purposeless and bland.
- matheusmoreira 22d ago
  That's exactly what No Man's Sky is though. There are entire communities centered around colonizing entire regions of the procedurally generated space. People build some seriously intricate bases and it really makes the worlds feel lived in.
  - fallingbananna 21d ago
    The last time I tried Minecraft, from the point I dropped into the world, I could start punching dirt and trees and placing stuff around and building things. In No Man's Sky I got dropped in some world that felt empty with tutorial on how to collect some stuff and how to get to the ship. The first impressions weren't the same between these 2 games.
    - Pifanjr 21d ago
      I made this point earlier in the comments, but I think the main difference between Minecraft and No Man's Sky is that Minecraft does not push the players towards specific gameplay systems, while No Man's Sky does, making No Man's Sky feel much less like a box of legos and more like a collection of specific tasks/activities.
  - Ekaros 21d ago

pigpop 21d ago

I think it's very important to distinguish procedural generation as only one component required for emergent, unpredictable gameplay. If you lean on it too heavily then yes, you will just have 10,000 variations on plain oatmeal. The other ingredients that go on top of procedural generation are what gives it flavour (to torture the metaphor a bit). The next step after proc gen should be physical simulation, systems like erosion, continental drift, insolation, volcanism, etc. will produce much more interesting terrain. Several more layers of simulation can be added depending on the game but for a game like NMS an evolution system and a goal oriented AI behaviour simulation would be appropriate perhaps with some kind of history and population simulation for artifacts and colonies. The problem with adding simulation is that it's computationally expensive. There are ways you could disguise the loading times, especially in a game with space travel, such as travel times required to reach new star systems but anything that runs in real time like animal or NPC behaviour is a hard problem to solve. Dwarf Fortress is the paragon of this that everyone points to, for good reason, but Dark Days Ahead is also a good example. I'd like to see something equivalent done for a sci-fi space travel game but I'm not aware of any truly successful attempts.

JTbane 21d ago
There are some amazing examples of procedural generation though, such as Minecraft terrain and the orcs from Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.

urbandw311er 21d ago

I would say that the antithesis of this would be something like the Zelda Breath of the Wild. Sure, it doesn’t have the far reaching “million planets in a galaxy” thing going on, but it’s still vast for the purposes of being able to wander around for days. And, as you are discovering new towns, hills, fields, woods, cliffs and so on, it never begins to feel dull or repetitive. Because pretty much every inch of that map has been handcrafted by a team of dedicated humans. Obsessed with making it beautiful, perfect, varied and interesting throughout.