Bottery

In exciting news for bot-makers, Kate Compton’s advanced bot-making agent platform was just open-sourced by Google.

You can play with a live demo here.

Kate’s earlier project, Tracery, already powers thousands of bots and other generative things. The combination of ease of use and expressive power opened up grammar-based generativity to everyone and lead to an explosion of creativity.

Bottery takes the concepts of Tracery and puts them within a Finite State Machine, greatly increasing the expressive power available. While some advanced Tracery features add the ability to remember some state, using FSM--which are all about state--makes previously difficult things trivially easy. And with an accessible interface, too.

I fully expect that, given time, Bottery will be as significant for bringing AI to all of us as Tracery was. Meanwhile, you can use it for your ProcJam project. Or, with a bit of work, for your NaNoGenMo project!

There’s going to be an online launch party on the 8th, where Kate will be streaming and doing tutorials.

Kate Compton: Bot Poetics // Interrupt 4

There’s a ton of procedural generation research going on out there, and I’ve only been able to post a small fraction of it. For example, Interrupt 4: A Digital Language Conference is a two-day conference that’s going on right now and has talks by Kate Compton, Darius Kazemi, everest pipkin, Ramsey Nasser, and more.

Kate Compton’s talk above is just one of them. I do like the discussion of how constraints and limited possibility space make a safe space for interacting with the bots.

Her larger point, about the poetics of bots, touches on something I’m intensely interested in: what can we do with these generative things? We have all these amazing generative things, but I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of how we can can use them to convey meaning and evoke feelings.

Practical Procedural Generation for Everyone

One of the talks at GDC that I went to was, of course, Practical Procedural Generation for Everyone by mad scientist Kate Compton.

An extension of the encyclopedia of techniques that she presented in her latest zine, this lightning-fast talk was packed with stuff about all kinds of generative methods. Even if you know a lot about generative things already, you’re likely to encounter something new here, on top of a whole lot of ideas for how to make things better or combine them in new ways.

Best of all, the recording of the talk is available to the public, so you can watch it too:

Travels in Od

At this point, you can assume that I’ve met a lot of people who are working on generative projects. (Though I’m always looking to meet more!) So I happened to be on the same train where Kate Compton was putting together this generative train ride with Tracery-powered text, though I didn’t see it until much later.

It’s mostly self-playing, though you can stop the train at stations to pick up passengers. Or just watch the generated landscape roll by as you are informed of the local drinking songs or favorite blessings of the lands you travel through.

Encyclopedia of Generativity

Kate Compton’s latest zine is a super-practical encyclopedia of generative methods.

It talks about subtractive methods, constraint solving, fractals, distribution, parametric generation, interpretive generation, making an artist-in-a-box, and techniques to improve any generativity.

There’s a ton of great advice in this super-dense zine. If you’re stumped for ideas for your next project, picking any one idea from this and exploring it will keep you busy for weeks.

Revisions: A Call-for-Papers game

The 2017 Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games has put out a call for papers, and Kate Compton has used the new, updated version of Tracery to make a worker-placement research lab simulator game as part of the CFP.

Keep your grad students from stressing out! Watch them brainstorm! Double click on ideas on the whiteboard to start projects! Try to get them to finish writing papers in a timely fashion! Submit them to conferences and get terrible feedback from Reviewer Two!

There’s a ton of Tracery-powered procedural content generation going on here. I especially like the paper titles, and some of the stuff that gets written on the whiteboard describes projects I’d want to work on: Long-term Strategy + Tabletop RPG = ? Maps + Metroidvania->??? LudoForm: clustering for MetroidVania maps.

Practical Low-Effort PCG: Tracery and data-oriented PCG authoring

Another video from the Roguelike Celebration, this time about Tracery. Kate Compton talks about her PCG-authoring tool and what people have done with it.

Which is one reason I keep mentioning Tracery: people keep making things with it. I’m even using it as part of my NaNoGenMo novel, to add variations at different levels.

But the other thing about this talk that I want to highlight is Kate’s call for more tools that are as accessible and easy to write new content in. With more ready-made screws in the toolkit, we can focus on writing with the tools (and building new tools on top of the old tools).

Opulent Artificial Intelligence 

a manifesto by Galaxy Kate 

At the Lost Levels unconference this year, @galaxykate0 handed out manifestos in zine form. 

The central thesis:

I want to coin the term “Opulent AI” for AI that takes up all of the resources it wants, takes all the attention, and makes the experience all about itself.

FOR NO PRACTICAL PURPOSE WHATSOEVER

AI is often regulated to unobtrusive background plumbing, so GalaxyKate calls for AI that deliberately calls attention to itself. The tiny zine is jam-packed with examples of Opulent AI, some suggested exercises, and more.