I haven’t discussed my own research in this column yet, but you may know that I’m interested in automating the process of game design in its entirety. At the highest level, game designers produce mechanics…
Category: <span>The Saturday Papers</span>
The Saturday Paper – Exhausting
When programming systems it makes sense to keep complexity and scale in mind. Don’t try and render 400,000 sprites all at once. Don’t try and send the entire world state to every player on the…
The Saturday Paper – Guaranteed Candy
For some developers, all this talk of procedural content generation is bittersweet. If you’re generating a world map, for instance, you probably don’t have too many requirements of it. A bit of land, not too…
The Saturday Paper – Tower of Gamebel
Header image: Atlas Shrank, a PuzzleScript game. One of the aims of The Saturday Papers is to introduce people to new academic research that I think might inspire, help or just excite them. It’s also a…
The Saturday Papers – Empirical Results
While it isn’t quite twelve months since the start of The Saturday Paper, it’s the end of the year and that always makes me want to start summarising things, so I thought I’d take a…
The Saturday Paper – Dream Design
Image: Darius Kazemi’s incredible dissection of Spelunky’s Level Generator. What does it mean to make procedural content generation a part of your game? We can think of lots of games that use procedural content generation as…
The Saturday Paper – Metal Gear Science
Screens from Mike Bithell’s Volume (thanks Mike!) Stealth games seem to be types of action game on the face of it – often third-person, three-dimension environments with enemies and doors and navigation problems to solve. But…
The Saturday Paper – Turn Left At Next Plot Twist
Procedural generation systems – they’re just tools, right? They’re little bits of code we slot into games to solve a tiny problem for us. Don’t want to design levels? Randomly generate them! Players getting bored?…
Read more of The Saturday Paper – Turn Left At Next Plot Twist
The Saturday Paper – Dicey Puzzles
When it comes to actually designing games, rather than just talking about doing it (as we often do in The Saturday Papers) simplicity is key. Although there are many weird and wonderful pieces of research out…
The Saturday Paper – In Absentia
Game developers (and academics) are really good at sharing their knowledge in certain ways. We have lots of conferences, we like talking to people about techniques and ideas, and the Internet is full of scattered…