6 research outputs found
10 years of the PCG workshop : past and future trends
As of 2020, the international workshop on Procedural Content Generation enters its second decade. The annual workshop, hosted by
the international conference on the Foundations of Digital Games,
has collected a corpus of 95 papers published in its first 10 years.
This paper provides an overview of the workshop’s activities and
surveys the prevalent research topics emerging over the years.peer-reviewe
Characteristics of generatable games
We address the problem of generating complete games, rather
than content for existing games. In particular, we try to an-
swer the question which types of games it would be realistic
or even feasible to generate. To begin to answer the question,
we rst list the di erent ways we see that games could be
generated, and then try to discuss what characterises games
that would be comparatively easy or hard to generate. The
discussion is structured according to a subset of the charac-
teristics discussed in the book Characteristics of Games by
Elias, Gar eld and Gutschera.peer-reviewe
A general-purpose expressive algorithm for room-based environments
This paper presents a generative architecture for general-purpose
room layouts that can be treated as geometric definitions of dungeons,
mansions, shooter levels and more. The motivation behind
this work is to provide a design tool for virtual environments that
combines aspects of controllability, expressivity and generality. Towards
that end, a two-tier level representation is realized, with a
graph-based design specification constraining and guiding the generated
geometries, facilitated by constrained evolutionary search.
Expressivity is secured through quality-diversity search which can
provide the designer with a broad variety of level layouts to choose
from. Finally, the generator is general-purpose as it can produce
layouts based on different types of static grid structures or as freeform,
curved structures through an adaptive Voronoi diagram that
is evolved along with the level itself. The method is tested on a
variety of design specifications and grid types, and results show
that even with complex design constraints or malleable grids the
algorithm can produce a broad variety of levels.peer-reviewe
Data adventures
This paper outlines a system for generating adventure games based on open data, and describes a sketch of the system implementation at its current state. The adventure game genre has been popular for a long time and differs signi cantly in design priorities from game genres which are commonly addressed in PCG research. In order to create believable and engaging content, we use data from DBpedia to generate the game's non-playable characters locations and plot, and OpenStreetMaps to create the game's levels.peer-reviewe
A constructive approach for the generation of underwater environments
This paper introduces Coralize, a library of generators for
marine organisms such as corals and sponges. Using constructive
algorithms, Coralize can generate stony corals via
L-system grammars, soft corals via leaf venation algorithms
and sponges via nutrient-based mesh growth. The generative
algorithms are parameterizable, allowing a user to adjust
the parameters in order to create visually appealing 3D
meshes. Such meshes can be used to automatically populate
a seabed or reef, in order to create a biologically realistic and
aesthetically pleasing underwater environment.The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT
projects C2Learn (project no: 318480) and ILearnRW
(project no: 318803), and by the FP7 Marie Curie CIG
project AutoGameDesign (project no: 630665).peer-reviewe
Tabletop roleplaying games as procedural content generators
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing
content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be
viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several
case studies linking key concepts from PCG research – including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative
pipelines – to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the
implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future
work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.peer-reviewe