Dynamic vs. Static Generation

During the week of GDC, Ben Porter started NotGDC, a non-event for game developers who couldn’t make it to GDC. His contribution was this essay about procedural generation (a topic that he knows a thing or two about).

I’m personally not sure if I like the terminology, since “dynamic” gets overused for a lot of stuff, but the distinction between just-in-time/run-time and pre-generated but still procedural content is an important one. Run-time generation gets a lot of the press, since it’s obvious to the end-user, but construction-time generation has been a quiet workhorse in a lot of production pipelines.

Indeed, a lot of new techniques start out as artist tools and only later get re-purposed for real-time use. But because players seldom see them, there’s not as much awareness of just how much of game development is really tools development.

https://medium.com/@eigenbom/dynamic-vs-static-procedural-generation-ed3e7a7a68a3#.3uirqymwh

Seeds, vol. 1

Seeds is out! The ProcJam zine, organized by Michael Cook and Azalea Raad and edited by Jupiter Hadley is available for download. With 106 pages of things making things and other procedural talk, plus a bonus a cut-out section for Kate Compton’s Generative Fun Corner. (Ideal for coming up with your own ProcJam idea.)

It covers such topics as: Why is music like a spring? An easy way to generate fictional alphabets. A postmortem on generating towns. Growing self-representational life forms. Combinatorial literature. Being less random. Gardening games.  A couple of my own contributions.  And a lot more.

A whole lot more: I haven’t finished going over the whole thing in detail yet. I expect I’ll be finding new ideas from it for quite some time.