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The Cluster is an exploration game I've been developing in my spare time for some time. You can see all posts about it here. It looks like I didn't write any posts about it for all of 2015, yet I've been far from idle. By the end of 2014 I had done some ground work for fleshing out the structure of the world regions, but the game still didn't provide visible purpose and direction for the player. ...

Two weeks ago I participated in Exile Game Jam - a cosy jam located remotely an hour's drive outside of Copenhagen. There was a suggested theme of "non-game" this year. This was partially overlapping with the online Procedural Generation Jam (#procjam) which ran throughout last week with the simple theme of "Make something that makes something". I wanted to make a combined entry for both jams. My idea was to create procedural landscapes with a focus on evoking a wide variety of moods with simple means. I formed a team with Morten Nobel-Jørgensen and got an offer to help with soundscapes from Andreas Frostholm, and we got to work. ...

Procedural generation has gotten a lot more popular since my interest in it started 10 years ago. Today most game developers and even many gamers know what it means in broad terms. In this piece I want to highlight fundamental differences between three approaches to procedural world generation: The simulation approach, the functional approach and the planning approach. The approaches are not only algorithmically very different but are also suitable for different types of games and gameplay. Here's a breakdown and analysis, with lovingly hand-drawn - err, ...

If you're creating anything procedural, you're almost guaranteed to come in need of random numbers at one point. And if you want to be able to produce the same result more than once, you'll need the random numbers to be repeatable. In this article we'll use level/world generation in games as example use cases, but the lessons are applicable to many other things, such as procedural textures, models, music, etc. They are however not meant for applications with very strict requirements, such as cryptography. ...