A-I-NDIE
AI-nCEPTION
AI has been a synonymous part of the game development industry since its inception. The gaming industry prefers to create predictable yet interesting AI synthesized system that tends not to overwhelm the players.
From the first side-scroller games like Mario to current-gen AAA games like Control and Resident Evil all are built on top of the same fundamentals of path-finding and finite state machines. Most of the AAA studios have a dedicated crowd which they don’t want to lose, these crowds have been build over decades of work, and because of this AAA games tend to have very limited underlying technological advances.
INDIE-CEPTION
Indie games are a crucial part of the game industry. All of the AAA games that we see or play right now were once made by Indie developers. Like that many such developers venture out to create their narratives, worlds, characters. and stories. Every year we see a ton of Indie games coming out, some of which break the industry attracting thousands of players.
But why indie you would say? Because They take the risks.
Time and time again Indie games have proven to break boundaries and standards on which the industry is built. Because of this innovative and outright approach towards their development Indie developers tend to use a lot of different techniques.
One Such technique that got popular over recent years is Procedural Content Generation. Though the use of Procedural Content Generation or PCG is not new, its application was very limited.
Early History and Development
The first known game to have such a system is “The Sentinel”, created in 1986 by Geoff Crammond which used PCG to render out all of its 3D levels. Another example was .kkrieger, developed in 2004 was only 96KB in size and could generate a variety of different levels with PCG.
Minecraft, a very popular game developed by Indie studios Mojang and later acquired by Microsoft, is quite a remarkable example. The game uses PCG to create worlds that are completely different from one another. Now, these worlds had different regions, area-specific NPCs, and even the height, width, and depth of certain features were completely different. This offered a more immersive and challenging playstyle.
After Minecraft, Indie games like Terraria and Spelunky took the world by storm and they are still going strong to this day. All of this paved the way for a generation of Indie games that depended on PCG to provide a much more surreal and immersive experience to its players.
The Torch Bearers
Indie games have always been identified with 8-bit and 16-bit graphics but each having its own distinctive art style and designs. Following that games like Faster than Light, Don’t Starve, banished, etc continued to develop with PCG and in turn winning a lot of accolades for creating games that truly defined how far PCG has come along.
The Worlds As of Now
In the past few years, we have received games like No Man’s Sky, Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, Islanders and etc which have defined that even in moderns time PCG can deliver and adapt to what players want. Rogue-like and Survival games constantly add games to their roster that have explored and exploited PCG to the max. Creating near-infinite worlds with variations that are uncountable.
Because of such many AAA studios have been adapting PCG and semi-PCG elements to their development cycle.
Rust, a survival crafting game that has grown in popularity over the years also uses Semi-PCG elements and is a notable mention for its development cycle to date. Rust uses defined landmarks and certain constraints to create a procedurally generated map that is not entirely different every time but can have a different layout over each seed. This layout affects how the terrain is shaped, and how each landmark is placed. One of the coolest factors is the roads, tunnels, and water bodies that get formed while the map is being generated.
What’s yet to come!!!
The gaming industry especially the indie developers are moving with phenomenal speed and at the same time deliver breathtaking games that have received multiple awards over the years. PCG has changed how we looked and perceived games. It has allowed development cycles to be short but not contentless. Rather PCG based games have more to offer when fired up each time from the start.
Now, more developers are shifting towards much more complex Generative systems like GANs that can completely change the playing field of how things are going right now. We can already see the usage of PCG in 3D softwares that are in turn used to make the game and its assets. We have already seen AI Dungeon and AI Dungeon 2 which has used GPT2 to create an amazing text-based adventure. And it won’t be long before such advances are made in the world of 3D games.
Did you play any of the above-mentioned games or do you know of a PCG-based game do comment below?
