Last year I was approached to write a chapter for a Springer book about procedural generation along several other authors. It was published this week:
Game Dynamics: Best Practices in Procedural and Dynamic Game Content Generation
There’s interesting chapters dealing from player matching to procedural adventure games. My chapter, specifically, is “A Primer on Procedural Character Generation for Games and Real-Time Applications“, where I cover some fundamentals and best practices for procgen characters in 2D and 3D. It’s mostly a literature review, with the only new contribution being the mesh socket technique.
There’s no preview and the chapter costs €30 a pop (sheesh!) but as paywalls are not my thing, if you don’t need the concise, properly worded and citable source for the information, these posts contain the meat of the chapter:
- Procedural chess pieces (hacking together mahogany pieces for my #procjam chess game)
- Poor Man’s Sky (how I created the imps in the Invocation Prototype)
- Digital Archaeology is an Impossible Creature (when I almost lost my mind searching for how a 15 year old game did things)
- Combining meshes seamlessly (the mesh socket technique)
And here’s a shorter version of my 3-page reference list, with as many of the accessible links as I could find:
Procedural characters/meshes
- Chris Hecker’s Liner notes for Spore
- Rigblocks: Player-deformable Objects (early tests)
- Impossible Development Diary
- Optimal boundaries for Poisson mesh merging
- Modular Character Workflow
- “Papers, Please” devlog (2D characters)
Texturing / Rendering
- Player-driven Procedural Texturing
- Old School Color Cycling with HTML5
- Illustrative Rendering in Team Fortress 2
Animation
- IK Rig: Procedural Pose Animation
- Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-created Morphologies
- Procedural locomotion of multi legged characters in dynamic environments (full thesis in French)
It was an interesting experience writing for Academia(TM) again, although very, very hard. Not because I had to change the tone and the rationale quite a bit (and I thank the editors and revisers very much for helping with that), but mostly because of all the hoops you have to jump writing from outside an university’s VPN to search for citations. And the hoops are on fire.
Next time, I should write a chapter about “how to properly cite your stuff without spending a dime”.
Then sell it. 👹
Yanko Oliveira 