#procgem

Li'l Taffer

I have a taxonomy I use to determine which games made the biggest impression on me. The highest category is "games which I have incorporated into my dreams" and it is fairly rare that a game gets added to that list. One of the first games on that list is Thief: The Dark Project, and if you're going to tell me that you made a Thief-inspired stealth game with procedurally-generated levels that will of course catch my attention.

Thus when David Lindsey Pittman's 7DayFPS/ProcJam game crossed my path, Li'l Taffer caught my attention.

It definitely captures the vibe of Thief, though the procedurally-generated levels made me think about how much of the original game is about learning the layout of buildings and how architecture works. So while the levels do have the feel of some of the more surreal Thief maps, they lack the hand-placed coherency that the original game relied on.

There's ways Li'l Taffer could have mitigated this. There's already some logic to the way that some rooms are constructed (libraries and bathrooms and the like) but I think a generative project needs to go harder on signaling to the player what is going on. We can't rely on the presence of a human sensibility in the level designer, so that sensibility needs to be encoded into the level generator in a very visible way. Or, it could have gone the other direction, and played up the surreal nature of the levels. They are, after all, designed by an alien intelligence intruding into our dimension (i.e. an AI level designer).

In the event, the rules of Li'l Taffer as a game make bad situations recoverable, using the Thief approach to dealing with partial failure margins and applying it to generated content, similar to the shovel in Crypt of the Necrodancer. Which is a good reminder that the fixes for weaknesses in your generator don't necessarily need to be in the generator itself. In this case, the gameplay is about recovering from the difficult situations the level generator throws at you.