Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is both the Holy Grail and flying car of video games — a panacea always 5 years off. What’s the hold-up, why will PCG be vital to us over the next 10 years, and why should you be thinking more seriously about it in your game design? Dejobaan has used PCG within its award-winning 2009 indie title, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, and has been developing techniques for its upcoming, entirely procedurally-generated Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby. This session talks about PCG’s history along with roadblocks, best practices, and ways we’ve found that PCG enhances creativity in the content creation process.

Learning Objectives

• See how manual content creation and PCG trade off on strengths and weaknesses and how using them together can empower creators.

•   Implementing PCG algorithms becomes exponentially more complex and clumsy, the more expressive you want them to be. Use a modular approach to break things down into manageable components.

• Empower your creators to produce content more quickly, allow your games to react to players in ways otherwise impossible, reduce on-disk footprint of content and allow your team to become more creative through experimentation/iteration with strong and expressive PCG tools.