Procedural generation is an interesting topic to me, as it forgoes traditional level design in favor of a bunch of formulas, rules, and random elements to make varied replayable gameplay.

One of my favorite procgen games is Dwarf Fortress, and how it creates a fully realized world with lore and history, and then places both fortress and adventures as relatively small stories in said world.

Also Deep rock galactic is great in varying its caves, from normal tunnels to massive caverns that you can only traverse using ziplines and platforms

Any other interesting procgen games?

  • simple@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Noita is a great one. Making a randomly generated world this consistent while simulating a million particles and not having it collapse on itself is really cool.

    Despite the fact that I don’t like No Man’s Sky very much, its procedural generation is also pretty impressive. Planets have a lot of variety to them. It’s a very pretty game.

    • AlFalcon@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      not having it collapse

      I’ve dead ass had levels in this game where as soon as I load the safe zone shake my screen for minutes at a time. Like what y’all doing down there blowing all them boxes up?

    • Merthin1234@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I’ll agree with No Man’s Sky here as well. While sandbox type games aren’t my favorite (I do find the expeditions fun though) the amount of procedural generation is really cool.

    • crowlemo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Tough learning curve but yeah, one of the most impressive procedurally generated games out there.

      There’s plenty roguelikes/terminal games with procedurally generated content as well. ADOM or nethack are two of the most popular examples.

  • afaix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I like how terraria and minecraft mix premade blocks with procedurally generated terrain, also Spelunky has interesting level generation, they even had a talk about it.

  • Homeschooled316@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    Age of Empires 2 skirmish maps are procedurally generated, in contrast to other competitive RTS games of that style. It’s done quite well and makes scouting meaningful for reasons other than rock-paper-scissoring your opponent.

  • PenguinTD@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Returnal is not fully procedural, it’s lego like procedural.(rooms types are limited, but the layout is procedural.)

    Riftbreaker(RTS-ish with a player controlled mecha) procedural generate the location and missions so the resource type distribution roughly matches how much you “expand” your area of control. (ie the more you expand outward, the more rare resource patches starts to show up.)

    Many rougelike/lite use procedural generated levels.

  • spedswir@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Factorio has cool, and very customisable, procedurally generated maps. The ore distribution, quantity, biters, cliffs, water, all change game to game.

    • Chailles@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      In my opinion, I don’t think No Man’s Sky’s procgen is very good. Or at least, it doesn’t feel very good to experience. It just all feels so samey, partly because it’s kind of “too diverse” and shows all it’s got way too quickly.

      • little_hoarse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        You’re not wrong about that. I’ve only played about 15 hours of the game so far, but finding it to really feel samey most of the time

        • brsrklf@compuverse.ukEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          It really is. I like no man’s sky, but most of it starts looking very familiar fast.

          Only exception, I still get good surprises with random creatures. Sure, they’re all based on the same few structures, but once in awhile I get some perfect combination of funny, dorky and/or cool that I just can’t refuse as my new pet.

        • Chailles@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          The ironic thing is that if the game just looked more samey, it’d actually be less of an issue. If all these cool stuff wasn’t everywhere, it would feel fresh for much longer.

          Like you can tell what parts of the creatures are reused cause you’ve seen like a hundred species within a few hours.