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[Golds]

I'd like to know more about methods of generating level content procedurally.  Are there any enlightening reading materials on this kind of problem, from a gameplay perspective?  There are already some great procedural threads around here, but I'm not sure if there are any specifically content design focused.

What especially intriques me about this problem space is that it forces you to abstract up one level higher than traditional game content creation.

What makes a level fun?  How do you design systems to challenge and reward the player?  How do you provide variety and unpredictability while maintaining a balanced difficulty curve, and an organic sense of pacing?

How do you design algorithms that think like Miyamoto?



There are a lot indie titles that explore these method to use for reference and inspiration: Spelunky, Canabalt, Rescue The Beagles, and many of the others from the PGC.  And i'm betting the forums had some good discussion during that competition, but I missed out on a lot of it.

And of course there's the whole genre of roguelikes, which I'm sheepishly inexperienced with.  But I'm more interested in action and platforming systems.
So post your techniques, papers, and articles here!  Or maybe point me to a better thread?

Thanks guys!

[st33d]

For Red Rogue I used a cliff-finding method to deal with drops. Any ledge you walk off of is a cliff, so if you locate all of the cliffs you can spawn content to accomodate them.

For my nitrome Avalanche game I used map sections stitched together that were designed on a map editor. I placed markers on each pre-made chunk to let the level generator know where to stitch each new section on to the last.

[kometbomb]

Not platform specific but for a game I'm working on, I have a "seed map" that I have to design myself but it's extremely quick to do that since every tile in the seed map is something like a half screen worth of generated tiles. It's then straightforward to generate a suitable section because you only have to worry about the current seed tile (which are as simple as "a straight, vertical section", "a narrow section").

The game is about a spaceship so there are no real limits where the player can go. But the idea should work as well if you take the limitations of the player character in account when creating the seed. This idea could be of course extended so that there's something generating the seed also.

There was an interesting academic paper about creating platformer levels based on rhythm. That addresses the problem that purely generated content isn't necessarily too fun to play even if it's possible to finish the level.

[nikki]

have you seen THIS ?

[Tycho Brahe]

Try looking at some sourcecode to see how others do it. If I recall correctly there is a wiki like thing devoted to all things rougelike so they should have at least one good example. Derek yu also released the spelunky source code recently, so if you want somthing along them lines and you have gm check it out.