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The Power and Peril of Procedural Content Generation

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 programming

o   Can guarantee validity

o   Difficult debugging

·         Optimisation

o   AKA search-based PCG

o   Using an evolutionary algorithm (or similar) to evolve the content

o   Fitness function

o   General, requires little domain knowledge

o   Find unexpected solutions

o   Takes time

o   Fitness function may be hard to find

o   Can be used for tuning the game or creating new rules entirely

Two considerations that must be made when using PCG are player interaction and designer interaction. Player interaction refers to the extent to which players are able to “manipulate the content generation system as part of play” (Smith et al, 2015). For example, a game that generates an infinite number of puzzles for a player might give them an option to omit certain mechanics or only provide levels of a certain size as a form of difficulty choice. Designer interaction is how a designer uses PCG algorithms to achieve their specific goal, as the programs in use may not be perfectly tuned for the designer’s desired levels and they must alter the content generated. Player interaction is important to consider because the prevailing opinion is that PCG is an excellent tool for assisting designers in creating puzzles, but a designer that uses PCG without fully understanding its complexity may struggle to adapt it to a player’s configuration. However, it is counterproductive to restrict the use of PCG to programming experts that know how to adapt the algorithms as its purpose is to assist designers. To enable player interaction, there must be a certain level of designer interaction to facilitate it.


 (411) Making Things Up: The Power and Peril of PCG - YouTube

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