Hi,
Feel free to introduct yourself here.
I'm a IT manager from New Zealand who spent the last 5 and a half years working in the United Kingdom. I've just emigrated to Sydney, Australia with my wife, and spend my free time at the moment developing Unangband and blogging. I also write as the Amateur for GameSetWatch - although I haven't written an article for Simon in a while and I should really do one soon.
Andrew
Hello,
I'm a Bioinformatic (computational biology) student from Germany finishing my fourth semester this month.
In the holidays I'm intending to try and program a 3D level-generator for Tremulus.
(But I'll first start with a ASCII one)
On the way I'll try and fill up the Maze and random dungeon bits of this wiki.
Mark
This looks like a great resource, I'm glad I found it. I'm working on an RPG that may or may not use PCG, but at the moment I am thinking of an idea I have for a proceduraly generated game that I think someone else might be interested in making. I don't have any really programming skills to speak of yet, (I'm using RPG Maker to make my game) I'm mainly a writer, but there's a portion of the story for my RPG that will be about some guys who happen to be computer programmers who are discussing the true life 'haunted house' in San Jose, the 'Winchester Mystery House' and the concept in the game quickly became an idea for a real life game, a separate game that would require PCG. Basically my characters in my game came up with this idea, if you will. If you don't know the story of the Winchester Mystery House, here's a quick run down and my idea for the PCG game.
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
Hi!
My name is Henrik and i work as a game programmer for a small independent studio here in Sweden. Graduated this spring from School Of Future Entertainment as a game programmer. I really find the PCG interesting and think it's a way to evolve the current state of games, giving it more depth and variety. Interesed in every thing from level generation to procedural generated textures and also to find new ways to use PCG. Hope i can contribute something to this site and also learn new stuff!
Henrik
Hi!
I'm Emile, a French gameplay programmer; I'm working on a personal project that features a bit of PCG (in Python); I've played a bit with various algorithms, and think PCG has a lot of potential.
I'm also a Wiki fan, so I'll see if I can contribute here (barriers to entry right now: no obvious entry point/community portal, I didn't find recent changes, I'm not really sure where to start).
Hi,
Everything should be accessible along the top menus - Recent Changes are under the pages menu, where you can also add a page.
Welcome to the wiki.
Hi,
I'm Gøksel, from Finland. I am an 18 year old scener (demoscene), a high school student and I have coded/been a part of the following projects:
Caret by Resident (Textmode demo)
Wasted by Resident (J2ME cellphone demo)
Infect Me With Your Kiss by Resident (1k procedural intro)
Crawlspace by Youth Uprising (1k procedural intro)
Snowflake by Beskrajnost (16k procedural game)
I am one of those people who swear by procedural generation, and thus am a big fan of things like Constructive Solid Geometry. I wish to contribute as much as I can to PCGwiki.
Hey Decipher,
Welcome to the community.
Having said that, I've just reverted one of your changes ;)
When talking about procedural generation, I tried initially to make a distinction between procedural content generation and procedural generation. Coming from a gaming background, it felt important to me to distinguish between stuff that affects game play, vs. cosmetic procedural generation. Obviously, this is a a continuum - visual changes can impact game play. There's a few people contributing to the wiki who don't make this distinction, however, so feel free to argue your case here, or go ahead and re-revert my reversion.
Andrew
I have made a few edits, so I suppose I should introduce myself.
I am droid or Andrew. (Andrew means manly or human, same root as Android but droid is cooler.)
What I would like to be known for is making cool games, but dreams have not yet met reality - I have not finished anything significant. Right now I am working on a game in python, we will see if that goes well.
However, I believe in this site and hope it prospers. I hope to see some activity in the forums. It would be much easier to edit pages if I could first throw out some ideas on the forums and get a response. I plan to use the forums as a place to share strange new things, and hope to see the same from others.
I look forward to working with you all.
droid
I'm definitely looking forward to more community discussion. I wonder if we should start a 'link to the PCG wiki campaign' to try to get a few more people along…
Yay, another Pythonist!
I gotta admit, the Wiki as it is doesn't really encourage community discussion. It has a bit of an encyclopedic tone, it might work better with a more informal tone, like tv tropes and, well, most good non-wikipedia wikis :)
Some things that would help:
- clear starting points for more informal discussions (a wiki page like village pump / community portal), the forums feel a bit "far away" from the Wiki
- "discussion" sections in articles (rather than having a seperate half-hidden discussion page)
- A more informal tone in some articles - more "I think that", "this kinda sucks", less encyclopedic tone (When editing a page, I found myself avoiding too personal language)
Whadda you think of those, Andrew (Doull, not droid)? If you have no objections I'll start editing away in a dirty way so the wiki doesn't seem as formal and cold :)
By the way, the use of namespaces (taxonomy, algorithms, etc.) is a bit of a barrier of entry for editing; it doesn't promote accidental linking, and requires quite a bit of double checking to make sure you're linking to the right place. As far as I can tell it makes more harm than good (especially as there aren't clear rules as to what should go in which namespace)
Feel free to give the place more of a community vibe.
With regards to the name spaces - it seemed a fast way to build up links between various pages, particularly the classification of games, software and algorithms. You are right in that it's a barrier to entry though.
I guess setting up categories is the 'correct' approach - is that too much work now?
Hi!
Graham here — game designer, been in the insdustry a couple years. Teaching myself how to program, mostly through procedural generation and generative art… This site is like magic for me! Thanks huge!
I agree strongly about the namespaces thing; having started several wikis of my own, I have a strong distrust of namespaces. Consider their purpose: to prevent naming collisions. But how many games are going to be called 'runtime-random-level-generation' ? Not many I assure you. ;)
If there are collisions, wikipedia-style disambiguation pages still encourage accidental linking, and increase user exposure to content, rather than hiding it away.
I haven't ever played with Wikidot, don't know what kind of control it offers for rearranging these things (going to start a sandbox and play around with it). This seems like a community I can really get into, I'll report back here if I find anything interesting. :)
Hi guys, I just discovered this place and it looks to be a very useful repository for PCG resources.
I'm a 34 yo mediocre programmer from northwestern Italy…I'm not very sure my contributions will be useful for the community and I don't see myself stopping by in the forums very often, but I saw there are few members registered and thought it was a nice boost anyway to have some new guy around.
By the way, I'll be devouring all the informative material presented here and hope to learn something even if in the end I won't be able to create a "product" (I'm much for studying for pure knowledge).
My actual "dreams" would be applying PCG to world creation, focusing on caves (maybe based on hexagonal-cell mazes) and cyber-megalopolies
Bye all!
Hello everyone! I'm Eugene, Animator from LA. I've work on both games and film - both are just as fun to do if you ask me. I fell in love with the concept of procedural generation in games long before I knew it was called something. The idea of having a Mario Bros. game where every level was invented for you, right there by the computer, just sounded so cool. Never got interested in ASCII dungeon crawler-type games, but I have to admit I'm quite impressed with what some of them can do.
Recently, I've been stuck on the idea of procedurally generated storylines. It just seems to me that all these Game Companies could save an enormous amount of money on personnel if the job of creating mediocre game stories was handed over to computers. Or at the very least force them to come up with something better than the algorithms can come up with. :D
As a non-techie, I'll be around more for intellectual curiosity and knowledge absorption than as an active editor, but I may pop up from time to time, depending on the circumstances.
Cheers!
Hello!
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
The wiki is not dead at all - I suspect it's that the regular contributors have been quite busy (I'm in the middle of working through an Unangband release, for instance). Feel free to contribute - I'm quite happy to proof read anything you've written.
Hi there! Here's hoping I'm not too late on the scene and someone's still around to share experiences!
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
Hi, I'm Frederik from Demark where I design and program games as an independent game developer. Roguelikes and procedural content generation have always been among my interests, and I hope to both learn from and contribute something to this wiki. My current games don't include much in the way of pcg, but an upcoming game definitely will. I found this site because I recently helped with the localization of Eldritch and wanted to add it to the list of games here, since it has procedurally generated levels.
Cheers,
Frederik
Creative Spark Studios
