I'm sure most of you are sick and tired of seeing "Procedurally Generated" in the blurb of almost every game nowadays, and for good reason. procedural generation is a tool, a very useful tool, but using it to generate 95% of your content is a result of misunderstanding how that tool should be used. I use Proc-Gen all the time, but I never let what the computer spits out land in the hands of my players. I tailor it, shaping and moulding that mess of generated content into something useable, something fun. I'm very thankful that Proc-Gen wasn't something I was aware of in my early game dev years, I had to make everything by hand. While I use Proc-Gen to speed up the dev process, I think it has a way to go before it can successfully create an entire game. Now, I know you're thinking "That's not how Proc-Gen works," and you're right. Procedural generation is something a good developer understands innately, something they've put love and time into, it's not some cold, dead, algorithmic computer vomit. But that doesn't change the fact that when you rely too heavily on Proc-Gen, you get a lifeless result. Use Proc-Gen to enhance your games, speed up your dev process, eliminate the busywork, but don't use it to make your games. That's all for now, thanks for reading.
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The Value of Procedural Generation
Hand Scripted events, items and layouts are something "large" games can miss. The player often finds the world as wide as an ocean with about half the depth of a puddle, example No Man's Sky.
but using it to generate 95% of your content is a result of misunderstanding how that tool should be used
I don't think you get to tell the world how a certain approach should be used.
I see the problem (especially in the most recent example of No Man's Sky) as being an obsession with every single variation being present in the game so that they can make that magical 18 quadrillion whatevers claim.
If you're going to use procedural generation to make player-ready content, you need to make sure it produces easily distinguishable results almost every time. You need to cut out something a sizable percentage of the results so that the differences between the things you keep are more obvious and more enjoyable.
And then, perhaps most importantly, you need an interesting game to make use of that content. Don't rely on assets of any sort to carry your game, whether procgen or hand-crafted.
I'm sure most of you are sick and tired of seeing "Procedurally Generated" in the blurb of almost every game nowadays
I don't base my game purchases on something as simple as this. I purchase games on the basis of whether it will be fun to play or whether it might be fun to play and occasionally because I want to see how a particular feature has been implemented.
Procedural generation is like any other tool/technique, used well it can enhance a game considerably, used poorly it can diminish the experience, But that can pretty much be said for any of the tools/techniques in game development. However I am in no hurried belief that the variety of applicable uses that procedural generation might bring to a game have all been explored, so arguing a limitation of their use doesn't really hold water with me.
Beyond that, given that the OP seems to be more of an opinion, wouldn't this thread be better served in the lounge rather that in Game Design as it is not actually seeking any feedback directly?
When I read the OP, I was like "How long will it take someone to bring up NMS?" And the answer was, of course, no time at all.
Proc-Gen could be used to generate 100% of your world, with enough iteration and testing. The challenge that NMS in successfully generating incalculable amounts of cohesive traversable art, kinda underlines is that that's not the same as generating a game. Even in the case of NMS, if they had scoped differently (an Earth-sized planet with 18 million different biospheres) with the same algorithm and had a Proc-Gen curator cut out things that didn't fit a particular diversity profile, the world would seem full and gigantic instead of empty and repetitive... with more time to focus on multiplayer and survival aspects, which aren't part of the world, and can't be proc-genned, but are how the game is evaluated most often. And room (and goodwill) for some pretty epic DLC as just one extra factor to the Proc-Gen could be used to fill out a whole solar system of similarly epic planets, and roll out the space game slowly. But, hey, hindsight is 20/20. Still, it's hard not to imagine what a team of 150 could do with this same approach that 15 guys used to make an appreciable however divisive game. In any case, teaching a Proc-Gen system to do the curation and editing that the OP suggests is the big innovation of NMS, and one that only an indie could do, and one that I hope AAA games will start to pick up.
The next step for Proc-Gen, and we've already seen some of this, is level design. We've seen Proc-Gen level design since the early days, and we already have city builders with some basic playability rules. Adding more and more and more level design rules to our city builders could, even with an indie company, create an arbitrarily large number of urban environments that were all playable and as diverse as Beverly Hills and Downtown Nashville.
But that's the rub... playability requires good gameplay. If you can generate a huge universe full of story and lore and all the story-generating systems, and platforming puzzles and secrets and etc... but the character isn't fun to move, or you haven't given collecting all the Proc-gen secrets meaning, then you don't have a good game. Maybe one day there will be a Proc-Gen system that can generate a whole game, a computer that can GM a great game of DnD, but right now, you still have to handcraft a good game yourself, even if you have a system that procedurally generates a perfect copy of real life, like real life, it's not fun unless a game maker makes it fun. Computers don't know what gameplay loops are, and they can't, because they can't empathize with the player and extrapolate from there. They don't even really know what story is, but a skilled game maker can make systems that have story values embedded in them that the player can latch onto.
And that's the other thing, don't be so in love with Proc-Gen that you are unwilling to do handcrafting that's needed out of pride or something. There's no need to make a game that 100% proc gen outside of having something fancy to put on the box, that, again as we learned with NMS, will become loved or hated based on the actual quality of the game.
But even saying 100% of your game is misleading. 100% of a gameworld isn't a game, and that's the real lesson that Proc Gen has to teach us this year.
I appreciate all of the discussion here. This thread is probably better suited for the lounge, I agree. Is there any way to move it?
In addition, this is just my opinion. By all means, use Proc-Gen all you want, I'm not going to stop you. I like to share my thoughts, that's all.
Love procgen. I have a blog on it and have created an procgen engine of my own.
When should or shouldn't you use it? The answer is the same as with other topics and technologies: it depends.
ProcGen is nothing more than an industrialisation process and so it comes with its pros and cons.
Still, if the concept isn't good, don't blame the execution, although execution has saved a lot of concepts :)
Procedural generation is great when well done and with artistic input. Take a long at most of the very low size demo scene, really nice visual, often proceduraly generated but hand crafted still for a very good data size / visual quality ratio.
