Procedural Game Coding Contest (May 5 to June 2)

[mouser]

The indie game coding website tigsource.com is holding a short programming competition focusing on games that use procedurally generated content.

The competition runs from May 5 to June 2.

Procedural Content Generation is just a fancy name for an old technology that was popularized by Will Wright's Spore media blitzkrieg (which seemed like they were trying to pretend they invented the concept) -- it refers to any scenario where rather than fixed human crafted content, a game employs some algorithms to dynamically create some content (environment, mazes, etc.) during gameplay.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1646.0

[f0dder]

That's a pretty neat idea for a competition... and especially with today's fast CPUs, I'm sure you can generate some pretty hefty content on the fly. Or do even heftier precomputations, like 64kb intros have done for a while (farb-rausch have some good samples of what you can do if you're smart about doing it).

[dnm]

Procedural Content Generation is just a fancy name for an old technology that was popularized by Will Wright's Sport media [...]

I think you meant "Spore". Just in case people were confused.

[mouser]

right you are -- thanks for clarifying that.  i've corrected it now in my post.

[dpierron]

Procedurally generating content in games is nothing new at all, as you cleverly remarked...
So basically every random roguelike are easy entries in this contest...

[Deozaan]

Procedurally generating content in games is nothing new at all, as you cleverly remarked...
So basically every random roguelike are easy entries in this contest...

Indeed! Even popular games like Diablo have quite a large dose of procedurally/algorithmically generated content mixed in them.

I suppose then, the skill comes in coming up with an algorithm to procedurally generate something.

[iphigenie]

all rogue likes are procedural then, and so would Depths of Peril, Dominions, Dwarf fortress, Daggerall, Elite
(have all of those apart from Daggerfall which I played a long time ago and still try to buy now and then)

Although I suspect they are after simpler procedural mechanisms and ideas

Always wanted to explore that side of things but a)too chicken b)no idea at the moment

[mouser]

The results for the Indie Procedural Game Coding Contest have been posted, looks like some pretty cool stuff.  You can download and play them all.

http://tigsource.com/articles/2008/06/26/procedural-generation-competition-results