They say, “hey, we’re going to deprioritize graphics and interfaces, but in return we’re going to put a lot of effort into simulating the systems that are inside. Roguelikes invert the model of a lot of AAA games. When I asked Jason Grinblat, who along with Brian Bucklew develops Caves of Qud, why he likes working in this genre he said: Qud takes place millions of years in the future, after so many civilizations have risen and fallen that humanity itself has evolved in a thousand different directions.
Caves of Qud is a sci-fi rogue-like game I think exemplifies this spirit. Rogue-like games today have procedurally generated worlds and permadeath but there’s more to the genre a sense of experimentation and emergent weirdness I find exciting. Rogue-likes are named after the game Rogue, an adventure game that had some really influential features: permadeath – when a character died there was no restoring from a save or reusing that character – and the floors of the dungeon you’re exploring into are generated randomly. These games have exploded over the last ten years both due to huge improvements in the power of computers as well as the success of games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac.īut to find truly strange, interesting, and challenging uses of procgen we need to go to the original procgen-based genre: true rogue-like games. I think we’re entering an exciting age of procedural generation in games, with high profile successes like No Man’s Sky and the rise of procedurally generated levels in indie games. The alternative is to create these things by hand, one at a time and ahead of time. With games, procgen is a huge range of techniques for doing everything from generating unique music to building dungeons to creating maps, calendars, and histories of entire civilizations in real time. Procedural generation, or procgen, is the art of of pseudo-randomly creating things from seeds - a unique number or phrase used as input to generate a unique result.
Learn how procedural generation can be used to create infinite maps, music, and worlds to explore. Twitter Lists for Programming and Computer Science.