#procgen games

Voyageur

Voyageur is a just-released game inspired by both Fallen London and The Annals of the Parrigues. Your spaceship has a drive that only works in one direction: towards the galactic core. At each jump, you visit a new, procedurally generated planet and explore ongoing stories bit by bit.

The narrative structure draws from the quality-and-choice structure inspired by the works of Failbetter Games. Your stats, qualities, and cargo affect the results of your choices. And the small story moments often lead to other story nodes.

The planets use a system influenced by Parrigues, with an original aesthetic tarot: Chrysalis, Hammer, Star, Dome, and Ladder. I’m intrigued by the result, though I don’t feel like I’ve played enough yet to completely interpret all of their effects.

Risk of Rain (2013)

A co-op platforming shooter with roguelike flair, Risk of Rain uses procedural generation to enhance it’s challenging luck-pushing mechanics, adding uncertainty and risk to keep the punishing gameplay engaging.

The objective on each level is to find the teleporter, activate it, and stay alive long enough to kill the remaining enemies. This is all the more difficult because the difficulty of the game goes up over time, leaving to a trade off between finding enough powerups and leaving the level before it’s too difficult to survive.

While certain overall aspects of each level are fixed, a significant number of the subfeatures are randomly shuffled, plus the location of things like powerup chests and the teleporter. 

This keeps it play much more fluid than a fixed level would be: there’s enough uncertainty that your play choices are about both the larger system and taking advantage of the details of this particular instance. Rather than optimizing a best run-through on fixed geometry, the players must switch up tactics to match the situation. The parts of the level that are fixed provide a structure that experienced players can use to anticipate possibilities while never having a certainty. 

Proteus (2013)

Wait, didn’t we just talk about Proteus?

Well, yes. But that post focused on the visual and interactive aesthetics of Proteus, and this time I want to talk about the other half of the game: the sound.

Listen to the recording above. It’s a complete four-act symphony, completely unique to my last playthrough of Proteus. There will never be another one exactly like it. It was created interactively, as I walked through the world and listened to the audible reactions.

If it was just about the visuals, I don’t think the game Ed Key and David Kanaga created would have quite the impact that it does. It’s too easy to glide past a sunset when you’re just using your eyes. Tying it to the music that surrounds you lets you slow down and absorb the world in a fresh new way.