Lewis Wray MA Games Design

PCG to help designers not replace designers. High level approaches to content generation: ·          Constructive methods o    Piecing together pre-designed building blocks o    Spelunky o    Directed randomness o    Algorithmically lightweight (RNGs) o    Burden on artists to create highly modular content ·          Grammars o    Set of rules that are followed by the generation o    Easy to create chunks of content with varying complexity o    Over- and under- generating, repetitiveness o    Must test after generating ·          Constraint-based systems o    Domain defined in terms of variables and numerical and/or logical constraints o    Off-the-shelf-solver o    Must meet hard design constraints. Lots of logic progr...

 The Witness is a puzzle game designed by Jonathan Blow. the player controls a character that is alone on an Island that is populated by grid puzzles. The player solves these grid puzzles to unlock new areas of the island and progress through the game.  The puzzles begin by simply introducing the player to the concept of drawing a line through a 2D maze to the exit. The game then adds new mechanics and constraints to be met by each puzzle, for example passing through certain points on the grid or using the line drawn to separate icons of different colours. The expertise in the design of the game lies in the methods it employs to teach players about its mechanics. At no point does the game explicitly tell the player how to solve a puzzle or navigate a certain constraint, it instead provides the player with a very simple, small implementation of a constraint, so the player can test theories of how they think it could work and learn the solution for themself. Here is an example o...