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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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A long time ago amateur/indie game devs looked to procedural generated content as a sort of holy grail to generate games with more interesting content quicker. (it was esp common in the roguelike spaces). Didn't work out that way, stuff wasn't that easy to setup, and often was pretty shallow, buggy, and bland. But sure, this time it will work. (PGC still has its uses btw it just isn't a holy grail).
I didn’t read that as procgen so much as codegen. With the right team, it’s pretty easy to set up. Tarn Adams has been doing it solo for almost two decades. However, you are very right about how shallow and bland it can be at scale. TES II Daggerfall is one of the best examples of vast reach with procgen that gets real stale after the 100th dungeon that looks damn near the same.
Pretty easy to do, just takes 2 decades. ;). https://www.markrjohnsongames.com/games/ultima-ratio-regum/ Ultima Ratio Regum is a similar project also taking a decade of work now.
Well, all of the most successful roguelikes of the past decade use procgen. Slay the spire procgens the map and encounters. Darkest Dungeon was all procgen and it had sooo much replayability. The Binding of Isaac is all procgen.
Those are Roguelites [Angry man vs cloud noises], yes people use them, but in limited matters and it isn't some magical fixing thing that can do grand things. The bosses, events etc etc are all still setpieces. There was this time where people expected it to be able to do more, a magical time of hope and wonder, before Radiant Quests. (Several games actually did this btw, warning forever, all the games from Sodak Entertainment. It just has a small lacking thing, even if the games are cool, and anybody interested in this should have played WF and some of the Sodak games), or look at Crawl Stone Soup, how they use random dungeon generation combined with 'vaults' setpieces of terrain which can have special (and even unique, careful around those statues of Hellephants) effects added to them.
But there was a certain type of hype around the method. So much that it even had a wiki created specially for the method. Basically im more talking about the hype around it before people had figured out the limitations and effort involved. A bit like XML, the hype around that was also quite something. Obv XML has its uses, it just wasn't the magical thing people said it would be.