grep ‐‐week 52

The theme this week is:  null sweat chummers, see you next year.

CD Projekt Red receives grant for procgen research
@wccftech
The lo(ooooooo)ng awaited Cyberpunk 2077 maybe just got a boost towards actual existence, as CDPR takes in a $7mil government grant for research into “the creation of ‘live’, playable in real-time, cities of great scale based on the principles of artificial intelligence and automation,” among other technologies.  Of course they might just pour all of that money into the next Witcher, but we’ll keep hope alive.

ProcJam 2016
@itch.io
Videos of the talks are up from Procedural Generation Jam 2016.  I’ll be following up on this in the next few weeks once I’m home from holiday and have time to digest it all, but you can see this year’s entries there as well.

Procedural Sprites at GenJam 2016
@davideyork
However, I can’t seem to find any write-ups from the newly minted Generative Art Jam in SF, other than this very cool sprite generator.  The author essentially took an open source sprite collection, broke it up into pieces and palettes, and made a paper-doll character generator.

Bad Game Pitch Bot
@badgamepitchbot
This also came out of GenJam:  “What if we made a Call of Duty-alike, but with a dynamic romance simulation?”  — that’s what I’ve been talking about!

Everything Procedural 2016
@youtube
Videos of the talks from the Conference on Procedural Content Generation for Games in the Netherlands last month are also available.

Procedural Personality Generation
@gamasutra
More great output from the Moon Hunters team, who are now apparently literally writing the book on procgen.  Repeating the oft-given advice to err on the side of too much transparency in your system, Tanya Short adds an interesting observation:

“Most [procgen systems] expose character traits up-front and then allow the player to observe behaviour and compare their expectations to what the character does and how they appear. I believe this may be a symptom of players’ current relative illiteracy of procedural content, such that designers are under huge pressures to ensure their outcomes appear less ‘random’ and to ensure the systems they build aren’t ‘wasted’ in opacity from the player.” —Tanya Short

7 uses of procedural generation that all developers should study
@gamasutra
A repost from earlier this year (as part of Gamasutra’s year in review) covers a wide variety of use cases for procgen.

Magic Leap execs jump ship
@gamesindustry
This is a bit unexpected.  I had high expectations for Magic Leap to finally open the door for wearable computing (after Google Glass fell on its face), and now practically the first bit of news coming from their secret lair is all bad.  I guess we’ll find out the truth soon enough at the rumored unveiling at CES next month.