Procedural Generation in Game Design

I was looking for single topic books on game design and was recommended this. I instantly bought it when I saw Dwarf Fortess’ Tarn Adams. Who better to write about proc gen from?!But Tarn isn’t the author but the ‘editor’ (alongside Tanya X Short). My mistake. The book itself is from a series of guest contributors each writing chapters.This lends the book to feel more like an industry blog than a text book. While these chapters are somewhat logically sorted in to sections, it’s very incoherent.For example, procedural poetry is given the same amount of space as algorithms. The actual bones of this stuff. In fact the chapter on algorithms is right at the back of the book, many pages after the specifics and intricacies of generating poetry.What I was hoping for was a cover-to-cover read that flowed something like: Philosophy of proc gen, theory of the fundamentals, practical applications and maybe some worked examples to bring it all together. Instead it’s lived examples, where the authors talk in detail about the specific problems and approaches in their games. It also often assumes knowledge of the game, despite many being obscure indie titles.For a book so frequently concerned with game coherence and avoiding feeling random, it fails to do it for itself. And often feels like it was written by ChatGPT.I’ve yet to finish the book. Instead I think it’s best used as reference for specific topics. But realistically I’m more likely to Google or trawl the Gamasutra archive. In fact, it would better if this book were a blog as ultimately that is it’s format.

For a book that cost three and a half THOUSAND rupees, it turned out to be a very SMALL book in size, that's my first impression of it!! After I've been through it a little more, I'll report back here.

Lecture très enrichissante. Le fait que les exemples soient basés sur des jeux publiés est un gros plus.

Great for the variety of applications for PCG that it covers.It does warn you early into the book to not expect every problem to be solved instantly by PCG (a fair message) and it doesn't dig into the technical implementation details beyond a surface discussion.This is NOT a technical recipe book for building a bunch of different PCG systems you can use in games.Great starting point if you're interested in learning about PCG in other ways than you've already been exposed to.The variety of authors is very beneficial since each topic has its complex gotchas. It feels as if the authors talking about subjects have grappled firsthand with the problems that you'd face within that topic.The only minor fault is some of the charts don't line up with where you'd want them to be: 'As seen in Figure N-1' and Figure N-1 would turn out to be on the next page.

Excellent read. I want the second volume now.