Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Topics - WraithGlade

Pages: [1]
1
Programming / Hello Procedural El Dorado ^_^
« on: November 03, 2012, 06:59:22 AM »

Hello everyone, I'm new to the community so I figured I'd introduce myself briefly.

Most of my gaming experience has been with playing games from the commercial game industry plus some free/open-source games. Throughout my gaming experience though I've always had a very strong interest in games that featured procedural content generation and frequently sought to find more of them. I would occasionally find commercial games with some procedural generation, but for the most part it was uncommon. Random map generation was always one of my most sought after features in any game I was interested in.

Somehow despite all my extensive searching for games with random map generation, I somehow never became aware of the existence of Roguelikes. I've only recently became aware of the Roguelike genre's existence, but procedural generation is just about as close to my heart as any game feature could be.

I've been reading through PCG Wiki, RogueBasin, and various related sites extensively lately when I've had the free time. In fact, I originally became aware of the Roguelike genre through a combination of reading PCG Wiki and hearing about Dwarf Fortress (DF was the first ASCII based visual game I'd ever seen).

I've also been listening to Roguelike Radio (http://www.roguelikeradio.com/) and it's been quite enjoyable. I particularly like the fact that the contributors have such objective and deep conversations about game design that I haven't ever found anywhere else. In contrast, a lot of mainstream game design conversations I've heard in-person amount to little more than people talking about wanting to copy some already existing game with unsubstantial variation or spewing out nonsense advocating certain game design philosophies that only serve to make the industry more stagnant. It's nice to have a more thoughtful and farsighted perspective on things. The mainstream industry can be almost painfully uninteresting and arrogant on occasion. I give my thanks to the various Roguelike Radio contributors.

Anyway, as for myself I'm an aspiring game developer currently studying computer science in college, with a concentration in game design, and I'm about to graduate after this year. I also have a strong math background and I sometimes do a little bit of music composition and sound editing. Recently, I've started doing some digital 3D model sculpting and am finding it surprisingly easy, especially considering I have no background in art. I'm planning on taking it up as another hobby. It really is surprisingly easy to make good looking 3D models, I've found. I'm primarily a programmer, but I'm a jack of all trades somewhat with respect to some parts of the other disciplines. I'm absolutely determined to make my living in the game industry.

Procedural content generation (or "dynamic content generation" as I usually call it) is really something I've always been passionate about. It's my favorite subject in programming and I'm hoping to specialize in it when I work in the game industry. Working on dynamic content generation as my life would be awesome. It's just really the most interesting subject out there I think.

You can definitely expect a game using procedural content generation from me in the future (probably in full 3D), and some general PCG development contributions also. I've got some concrete new ideas for PCG that I haven't seen anywhere on these sites and I plan to implement them sometime soon in the future.

Oh, and in terms of design philosophy that you guys can relate to, my design philosophies are closer to streamlined/minimalist (i.e. think Brogue, DoomRL, etc). I prefer highly polished and streamlined games that focus on truly deep gameplay mechanics, rather than bloated and clumsy games.

(This brief intro sure got long...)

Pages: [1]