cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/145864
Procedural generation is an interesting topic to me, as it forgoes traditional level design in favor of a bunch of formulas, rules, and random elements to make varied replayable gameplay.
One of my favorite procgen games is Dwarf Fortress, and how it creates a fully realized world with lore and history, and then places both fortress and adventures as relatively small stories in said world.
Also Deep rock galactic is great in varying its caves, from normal tunnels to massive caverns that you can only traverse using ziplines and platforms
Any other interesting procgen games?
Nethack, Elite, Captive, Elder Scrolls, Magic Carpet, Simcity 2000 (reticulating splines)… oh, and a little game called Minecraft.
Procedural generation is common. The way Dwarf Fortress does it where the rules and game elements change is nearly unique. Pretty much just that and Nethack, AFAIK, which is why Dwarf Fortress stuck with Nethack-style ASCII so long.
In terms of elder scrolls procedural generation, hasn’t that only been the case for daggerfall?
The first two games, Arena and Daggerfall, were both procedurally generated on the fly.
Later games have been more of a “procedurally generate the game geography using perlin noise, freeze it, then paint the valleys, roads and cities onto it” approach. Not dynamic generation but not handcrafted from scratch.
I guess they had the radiant quest system, but it wasn’t very impressive. None of the dungeons in Skyrim were proc gen, unlike how they were in Daggerfall.
If you’re looking for something in the same vein as Dwarf Fortress, there’s Rimworld. It’s the game I hit 1000 hrs played the fastest, thanks to the ridiculous amount of mods available on the workshop.
No Man’s Sky
Faster than Light may be up your alley. I’ve put countless hours into it and there’s still hidden paths I have yet to encounter.
A few games including Caves of Qud uses Wave Function Collapse on their landscape and environment population. It’s an interesting technique that’s only just getting more traction in games.
This is a good repo of info on how it works and uses. https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse
I’ve had CoQ on my backlog for a while, I should probably finally start it sometime
Also WFC looks so cool
Love me some No Man’s Sky sometimes.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
4X game Shadow Empire has interesting proc-gen for its planets — they start out as randomised astronomical specs, including star type, orbital distance and inclination, mass, composition, those feed into how the landscape is generated, what life develops (if any), and from there it runs through a simulated history of colonization and collapse.
Detective ImSim Shadows of Doubt generates small cities filled with hundreds of citizens with relationships, histories, jobs, and routines.
Space life sim Sol Trader starts with a proc-gen history phase to set up the people and organisations in the world.
Space sim Elite: Dangerous, and its prequels, make extensive use of proc-gen to create their galaxy-size galaxies. It was quite something to see Elite II fit so much in an executable that’s less than half the size of the front page of this website.
Pioneer is an open-source space sim deeply inspired by Elite 2/3. Its system generator looks very similar to what I remember of that article.
Space Engine isn’t really a game, but deserves honourable mention for not just generating a galaxy-size galaxy, but a (nearly) universe-size universe.
I’ve had a lot of fun playing Descenders. It’s not usually my type of game but the way that the levels are constantly changing, but not so much that’s it’s completely different, is really cool to me! and keeps it interesting and challenging.
Are Hades, dead cells, enter the gundeon, children morta procgen games? Seems like a lot of rogue like or rogue lite games ho this path to make each run unique
Rust
If you’re interested in contemplating your life and questioning your own sanity because you can’t fucking play a game, you should try Dead Cells. It’s amazing trust me.
Plus one for Dead Cells, I play a lot of platformers and metroidvanias, but Dead Cells messes me up like no other game.
Check out Vagabond
