So what happened to this game? No Wikipedia article, no coverage, nothing

That depends on just how new the game is. When it's used as a buzzword, it inevitably means "we're bad at map design and too lazy to git gud" - a trend that seems exclusive to newer games, especially indieshit. When used properly, you get Dwarf Fortress.

Good point. I'd give an exception to text-based games. Anything else, though…

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Dorf forts isn't text based
ASCII graphics are still graphics, and could be(and are, in the case of tilesets) represented by standard 2D art

ASCII isn't text based? Are you pulling my leg here? That's literally what it is.

It's different once you map them to tilesets, but that's a different argument.

I think text-based is used to refer to games that are just read, like Zork and all that jazz.

Or maybe ones where you interact exclusively through text commands, ie. 'look,' 'take'

Nah, because that would mean King's Quest would be "text-based".

That was my understanding of the term, being born in 1985 and living through that era. I guess maybe some people have a different colloquial understanding of it now.

The point is that dorf forts' procedural generation would work perfectly in a game with what you would consider "graphics"

A game with no graphical interface that conveys the setting and game purely through words and receives input only through words. How does that sound?

Don't trust me on this, I'm borderline underageb&.

UnReal World, although it can be considered a roguelike of sorts, is graphical.

I'd say that it works well in dungeon crawlers and space games. In fact, it's a staple for many dungeon crawlers, to the point where it isn't really a bragging point or a buzzword.

But you have to remember that procedural generation does not necessarily mean "random map". If I recall, the original Elite used procedural generation, but effectively with a fixed seed. It was the only way to get so many star systems into the game given the resources available at the time. I'm fairly sure the later Elite games followed suit. You can find it wherever the map is simply too big to have been designed by hand. Even in open-world games, specifics outside of landmarks, mountains, etc. were likely procedurally generated during development, then hardcoded.

Depends on your config.

Dwarf Fortress uses tiles, and has for some time. It's just that the vanilla tileset is extended ANSI (not ASCII, as it doesn't have enough characters). You can run it through a console on any platform by changing print mode to TEXT in the appropriate config. When you do that though, you lose all of the OpenGL niceness, like playing fullscreen on a 4k monitor where you can view the entire game map at once.

Plus there's the whole thing that mentioned - that is generally what "text-based" implies.

Also a lot of text-based games had some sort of art, so it's a really fuzzy line between what's "text-based" and what isn't. Is The Hobbit (from 1982) text-based, even though it shows a picture of your environment? What about Wilderness: A Survival Adventure (1986), which used text prompts only, yet showed you a crude render of your surroundings and anything at your location?

Magnetic Scrolls games were godly, and The Thieves Guild was 10/10.

oh wow, I can't even get the exact name of my favorite text-based games right. It's Guild of Thieves.

Yeah, I think the key genres where it works is roguelikes and strategy games for map generation. I like that XCOM 2 brought back procedural maps, for instance.

Games that use procedural generation for GRAPHICS, though, are a whole 'nother ballgame of a useless technical gimmick.

First of all, what on earth do you mean by that
Second, if I'm correct in assuming what you mean by that, it actually works fine

It is a technical thing you can do that doesn't blow up, but have you ever played a game that uses procedurally generated graphics that was a great game?

No
That one that I posted is literally the only one I know of

that game looks neat, what is it?

Couldn't even make it more than 1 minute in.
I'm glad it's never getting released.

clearly a programmer demo, look at the life and ammo counts

huh, well hopefully it gets done. That screen alone reminds me of old school shooters.

kkrieger, that game that's entirely procedurally generated and takes up a grand total of about one hundred thousand bytes

Huh, looks interesting. If they sped it up and got some better animations for the weapons it looks like it could be a lot of fun.

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Same place Card Saga Wars went.

Never Ever.

it's not really point for it to be fun but for showcase what kind of game can be procedurally made

and they released engine source code long ago so you can make a good .kkrieger yourself

They have a Devlog on the forums but you have to register to see it. The developer has been posting steady progress; here's a video they took before taking the game to PAX to show it off there.

How do you feel about a tile based system? I'm an amatuer dev and I've been moving away from procedural as its just a mountain of work to get a plethora of boring outcomes. However, a well put together tile-based system with some extensive variants on the tiles seems like it could get the desired effect.

Many ARPG's use systems like this. Just curious as to the opinion on them/

That's what Chasm is doing - the rooms are all hand-crafted, it's just the way the rooms are arranged that is randomized.

Procedural map generation is fine, it just needs to work within your game's style. Full procedural generation of maps puts a heavy emphasis on gameplay and systems design–if you want to have interesting level designs or don't feel super-confident in your gameplay, you probably shouldn't do procedural levels.

That's generally how all 2d side scrollers do procedural generation

The game looks cool until he takes the elevator into permanent caveworld. Shameful waste of a good picel artist.

Ah, understood.

What I'm playing with right now for the title I'm working on is the idea of the populated areas of the game being built by hand (and some of the more important dungeons/hostile areas) but the wilderness being largely PCG from tilesets.

Agreed. What I'm kind of surprised more folks haven't tried to do is a tile based system where the tiles themselves are basically just a navmesh, and the enviroment they are present in determines the 'skin' applied to the tile.

Most levels, seen in a rough gray-box prototype format, contain some pretty common elements to their layout and shape. By doing some analysis of this you can distill out what the necessary "chunks" are that you need to build most of the 'filler' space in a level and then simply use the logic in the PCG to properly skin it and populate designated areas with appropriate clutter, cover, enemies, and loot.

This allows you as a designer to focus more heavily on crafting some set-piece content unique to the level/environment to give it some mechanically unique elements.

Example, lets say we are making a hack-and-slash ARPG. Two of the 'checkbox' enviroments that just about every one of these games have you traverse are a sewer and a mine of some sort. Now imagine these levels in graybox form. They are made up of almost identical parts!! Because you have a simple logic structure in place in your PCG system to interpet the proxy graybox and shit out a themed level from components you've populated it with, you can now spend your time on making some unique tiles exclusive to either enviroment that utilize some kind of gameplay mechanic specific to the area. For example, in the sewer it might be some kind of rotating bridge over an open pit with 4 ways out at the cardinal directions, but the bridge can only connect opposite sides. Put 2-3 of these in a maze-like level and getting them rotated in the right order to allow passage to various areas becomes a mechanic. For the mine, maybe some kind of mine-cart mechanic or blasting holes in walls.

You follow me? PCG can be layered over a hand-crafted design to streamline and lighten the load on a creator. When you start letting the system to level design on its own though, that can shit up your day.

That looks like SOTN clone, in not a good way.

But worst of all
This should be capital offence, I dropped Valdis Story because of this shit, dunno if they fixed it since then.

just play one of the other generic 2d "retro" style indie platforms, there's millions of them

I thought it'd be a nice alternative to keep the game install sizes small. Considering if things aren't 50 GB like the new Wolfenstein, they are at least ~20 GB now without procedural gen.

Out of my recent games, Elite: Dangerous is the recent one underneath 10 GB.

Look for Metroidvania on steam and the are barely 4 pages last time I looked for.
It's a shame since I really like 2D exploration stuff and at least 3 of those 4 pages were shit indie games, and not even pixel-shit.

I want more metroidvanias, even if the term is shit. Although not procedurally-generated, that's shit.

The point of secrets is to get players to explore handcrafted worlds holy shit these devs are retarded

Trash.

it looks so much like those H games by kiruyu or who ever. Kurovadis and the others.

Why does it have spic music?

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