I wrote a book that's kind of like stencyl and kind of like pcg and kind of on my own.

What it does is attempt to exhaustively classify all possible board and video games. Since it was my first book on the subject I omitted humans and complicated Physics and Chemistry.

After the explanation, in each dimension I came up with a long list of qualities. By being able to default them, set their value or difficulty, link them, and make further specification if necessary, I realized that I had described a program that would be able to regenerate 99.9999% of the board and video games out there (though generically) and produce a great many interesting games of your own.

You could create many interesting games with tiny amounts of code and very many with quite small coding.

Anyway, I still think the book holds up great so if you'd like I can tell you the book's name and maybe someone here can look at it. It was published Apr 26, 2019.

Cheers,
Alejandro
University of Havana

The woman who lived there was the widow of the inventor of the Winchester Rifle, the famous gun that 'won the west', and she felt the massive fortune she inherited was tainted blood money, and she thought she was haunted by the ghosts of all those who died from its machinations. She consulted a psychic who told her, oddly enough, that as long as she constantly was building onto her mansion the ghosts would not get to her and she wouldn't die, so she planned to use her wealth to build on to the house and as long she did so to live forever… But no building plan was implemented and the house ended up with strange corridors, stairways that led nowhere, and other weird construction follies. I was going to delve into procedural generation and pull out some metaphors for paranormal activity and haunting, but now I think it would make a really cool game in itself!

Can you imaging like a Tetris graphic level game (but slightly better) where you are the widow Winchester in the house, and you have to 1) Maneuver along the crazy architecture 2) avoid the area where the will be construction next, of which some timely warning will be given (this would be procedurally generated) 3) also, to keep the playing field not too wide, every once in an earthquake will come and level certain stories of the house, much like the great earthquake actually did to the real house.

I don't have the skills to create this game, like I said, I'm just a poor writer working with RPG maker to make my own game. But I actually think this would make a really cool game and I'm willing to share the idea if someone wants to actually make it as long as I get credit for the concept and some fair portion if it's sold. Anyway, that's what I'm doing on the site. In the meantime I'll be reading articles to add to the story of my own game, which you can find out more about at the-ultra-violet-catastrophe.tumblr

Cheers,
Frederik
Creative Spark Studios

I'm looking into pcg for modular board games, like the DOOM board game from fantasyflightgames. The novelty here is the limited amount of board pieces available, as opposed to the virtually infinite space of online games. Is anyone aware of similar work in this area, as I have been unable to find such work.

Cheers

Jon

I am Piotr, student of University of Lodz in Poland. I love the idea of procedurally generating content of games and I dedicated a lot of my time to doing research in such algorithms. The best game so far I found was Dwarf Fortress by Tarn Adams, that generate everything on-the-fly, ranging form map (including rain shadows, climates, river erosion) and ending with detailed history of every creature (elf, human, dwarf, or dragon), civilization, deities and world locations (like caves). Amazing!

I hope the Wiki is not dead and I'm eager to publish some of my researches results in forms of articles, source codes, etc. As I generally can't speak English well (all my papers were written in Polish), I hope that someone here would be so nice and correct any flaws. Just to give you a nice snapshot of what my algorithms can do, let's play with my random logic riddles generator written in javascript: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82366/Logic.html

Drop me a line or reply to this post if you want access to the Google Analytics information for pcg.wikidot.com. Unfortunately, the permissions model for Analytics as I understand it means I can only give View Only access without having to throw away all the historical information and starting again.

Regards,

Andrew Doull

Julian Togelius has set up a Google group for PCG at http://groups.google.com/group/proceduralcontent which appears to already have more discussion other than housekeeping than the forums here. I'd like to invite regular contributors to join the group - I suspect we should perhaps have a brief poll here on whether we should close down the forums here other than the General Discussion forum.

Regards,

Andrew

I'd surely consider AI content though, the difficulty and complexity of which certainly affects the enjoyability of the game. I'd say only include games that feature adaptive AI as a major feature, like Left4Dead.

On the topic of Left 4 Dead, could you point me to a description of its adaptive difficulty, if you happen to have one? Because my limited experience with the game seems to suggest that what the AI Director is more an example of Algorithmic Difficulty, rather than adaptive….if I try to play a campaign on a difficulty that is too high for me, I will just fail the campaign. Likewise if I play on a difficulty that is too easy, I will run through it unchallenged. The AI Director may place the zombies in new locations each time, or order in zombie waves in different locations, but if I opt to play a hard campaign, then the AI Director will algorithmically give me a hard campaign.

A lot of the press about Left4Dead mentioned it's adaptive difficulty - [http://www.edge-online.com/blogs/gabe-newell-writes-edge] is probably the easiest example to find. I'll add it to the article.

From the 'What PCG is' page, you have created this as your base definition of PCG:
"Procedural content generation (PCG) is the programmatic generation of game content using a random or pseudo-random process that results in an unpredictable range of possible game play spaces."

A potential problem with adaptive difficulty as a PCG technique is that rather than allowing the player to explore an 'unpredictable range of possible game play spaces,' the goal of adaptive difficulty (as I understand it) is to constrain the player into the game designer's preferred play space. That is, if you are too good at the game, the game will get harder, so that you progress as expected. The same is true of the 'too bad at the game' case.

Take Resident Evil 4, for instance. Much of the tension, the overall 'experience,' in the game comes from managing a small amount of resources, primarily ammunition. Therefore, if I, as the game designer, want to ensure that a certain scene or boss 'feels' right, I need to make sure that the player has a given amount of ammunition when entering the fight, so that they get the experience I designed for them. By adding adaptive difficulty, I introduce a nice negative-feedback loop which prevents players from straying too far from this 'optimal' play space, by either removing excess resources if the player is too good (and thus has an abundance of ammo) or by adding in resources if the player is too bad (and is running the risk of leaving the game out of frustration).

Next look at Oblivion. The adaptive difficulty in this game, as far as I understand it, scales the monsters' levels with that of the player. So if I approach a tower at level 1, I will fight a level appropriate enemy. Similarly, if I approach that same tower twenty levels later, the enemies will have leveled up appropriately (perhaps the bandits have full plate mail and magical swords instead of cheap daggers and torn clothing). Now, again, this adaptive difficulty serves to focus the game into a very comfortable and safe player space…I will always be able to vanquish my enemies, provided I put in approximately the same amount of effort as I did previously. This adaptive difficulty removes the player's ability to explore the more 'dangerous' parts of the play space in favour of keeping the game friendly and playable. Now, this may have benefits for many players (I personally disliked the leveling world), but as far as resulting in the exploration of an "unpredictable range of possible game play spaces,' Adaptive Difficulty, as I have seen it implemented, seems to be designed to do the exact opposite: to allow the designer to better control the player experience.

On the topic of Left 4 Dead, could you point me to a description of its adaptive difficulty, if you happen to have one? Because my limited experience with the game seems to suggest that what the AI Director is more an example of Algorithmic Difficulty, rather than adaptive….if I try to play a campaign on a difficulty that is too high for me, I will just fail the campaign. Likewise if I play on a difficulty that is too easy, I will run through it unchallenged. The AI Director may place the zombies in new locations each time, or order in zombie waves in different locations, but if I opt to play a hard campaign, then the AI Director will algorithmically give me a hard campaign.

Anyway, I hope I've at least provided a decent springboard off of which to continue thinking about the issue of adaptive difficulty as it relates to this wiki.

I've hit a stumbling point writing up an article on adaptive difficulty - always a controversial point in games. I'll quote the whole article to saving you having to go to the original link:

Adaptive difficulty is the process of adjusting the game in reaction to the player. By spawning new enemies or powering up existing enemies if the player is progressing quickly through the game, or by decreasing the frequency and/or difficulty of existing enemies if the player appears to be having problems progressing, adaptive difficulty techniques attempt to create the 'optimal' game experience.

Classically, adaptive difficulty has been seen as a hard problem, requiring a level of artificial intelligence in the game to attempt to model the player to attempt to determine if they are finding the game easy or difficult.

However simpler RPG style mechanisms can also be seen as adaptive difficulty techniques. Allowing the player to level up by playing through additional easier content can ensure the player is able to grind their way through parts of the game in order to decrease the difficulty of sections of the game where the difficulty level increases. Paradoxically, adaptive difficulty techniques which increase the difficulty of the game by scaling up enemy strength have been fiercely resisted by RPG players, as can be seen by the negative reactions to the difficulty scaling in Oblivion.

Adaptive difficulty is not usually seen as a procedural content generation technique, but it has most of the features of such techniques. It could be seen as decreasing a game's randomness instead of increasing it which would make games which feature it without other PCG features to fall outside the 'canon' of PCG games.

Should I include games which have adaptive difficulty in the PCG wiki? There are plenty of examples of games which have adaptive difficulty and are procedural (Oblivion I've already mentioned, Left4Dead) but there are plenty of games which are not (SiN: Episodes). And I don't want to include every RPG, based on the argument I've made above.

The real question is not whether I should include these games, and the answer to that is probably not, but why? What good reason can I give to not include SiN: Episodes, for instance, as a procedural game?

Again, the randomness argument is the most plausible, but it is not completely convincing.

Convince me.

I'd love to be there…

Thanks to whomever set those up.