grep ‐‐week 42

This week in procedural generation…

It’s Time For Spore 2
@rockpapershotgun
“Yet the sum is more than the parts, mostly due to the ability to subscribe to curated lists of creatures created by other users. Tick a few boxes [and] your world will then be populated by wondrous species. It inevitably leads to a planet (and eventually a galaxy) populated by creatures more interesting than anything procedural generation can yet generate.”  — Continuing the debate of the role of procedural generation.  My response to this article ended up requiring its own blog post.

Various Civilization VI Reviews
@wherever
With Civ6 upon us, I’ve yet to find a single mention of the procgen at the core of the Civ experience.  Interesting how Civ avoids this scrutiny compared to pretty much every other game since No Man’s Sky that clearly and openly uses procedural generation.  Why is procgen so invisible to the player in Civ?  Or is it just so well done in Civ that we don’t notice it anymore because the results feel so natural?

Probability Problems in Game Design
@game-wisdom
Some nice ideas about how to present random chance in games, like if RNG has a direct impact on winning or losing then all of the random factors involved should be explained thoroughly.  Hard to disagree, especially their point about Darkest Dungeon, which relies heavily on RNG but doesn’t explain it very well.  Personally I thought that this made the game feel fairly bland as a result, since the strategic choices of equipment and squad formation don’t reward the player by ever saying “yes, you made good decisions.”  The output randomness so greatly overwhelms the player input in terms of in-game feedback that it washed away the enjoyment of strategy.

How Zach Gage breaks all of the rules in Really Bad Chess
@gamasutra
Applying a bit of randomness to make a classic game like Chess more interesting.  Brilliant!

On permadeath and more
@keithbergun
I’ve recently started listening to podcasts, which I suppose I’ll share more of in some other post, but for starters here’s Keith Bergun of the Clockwork Game Design podcast discussing permadeath and other interesting things.