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Screenshot of a tumblr post by greatlordfluffernutter:
AAA Games: We’ve created a massive open world 500x larger than our previous game with a grand total of two (2) sidequests that have been copy-pasted all over the map. That way, you have many different ways to climb a tower to find where to shoot stealth mechanics base building zombies buy the tarnished pass today!
Steam Indie Games: We had the great idea of taking Sekiro’s combat system and making into a rhythm game! We then decided to make it a roguelike deckbuilder so we wouldn’t have to design a progression system or level layouts and the player can just reset runs until the game becomes good via monkeys and typewriters.
Itch.io Games: I made a 2 hour long game about the trauma of growing up as a closeted trans girl presented via metaphor of being a stowaway on a 25th century cargo ship delivering goods between Hong Kong and The Greater Empire of Americana. It’s also a roguelike deckbuilder.
Eh, Hades level generation isn’t anything special, just a few hand-crafted pieces stitched together with random enemy and hazard spawns. It works well for the type of game that it is, but in general the “room-lite” approach to procedural generation (where it’s largely a bunch of completely separate combat encounters in standalone rooms is not super interesting to me.
This is why Dead Cells and Spelunky’s procedural generation is much more interesting. Yes, there are hand-crafted pieces, but the way that they sometimes come together create very unique and cool situations that room-lites never achieve.
I love Noita for this reason. Every pixel is simulated and interacts/reacts to each other so as well so as well as the map being procedurally generated each run, you can interact and change it all as you progress. You can do some really wacky results with your wands if you build up your spells with good combinations, and there’s a somewhat hidden deep depth of alchemy to the game so mixing different liquids make different things/effects. Or get so high eating stuff you probably shouldn’t and somehow end up altering reality, changing one random liquid type to another for the rest of the run. You really needed water? Good luck, all water is now honey
Can easily have a run where you’re just exploding everything, and setting fire to every pixel that’s flammable, go a full acid build and dissolve everything, or just bathe and heal yourself in the blood of every enemy that you kill and go wild
Sorry, I realise I was talking about just the procedural generation of the game but ended up rambling into fanning over the game instead lol
The focus of Dead Cells and Hades is in different directions: while Dead Cells lives from generating well designed combat areas, Hades lives from using procedural generation to combine story elements. Both are an example of how you can fit pieces together without making stuff linear.
Definitely agree! It works well for the game type, I just really enjoy procedural generation for more than just generating a room for combat. Not saying that those games are worse, just less interesting in terms of procedural generation.