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…
DAGGER #1 – AIIDE 2013
Last week the annual AIIDE conference took place in Boston. AIIDE is a fantastic conference with a great mix of talks, and this time I was lucky enough to be co-organising a workshop as part…
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 International Conference on Computational Creativity
The next International Conference on Computational Creativity published its Call for Papers this week, which is normally only interesting to researchers who like receiving emails that start with “Sorry if you receive this more than…
Read more of The International Conference on Computational Creativity
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…
The Saturday Paper – Procedural Guneration
While we certainly value innovation in the games industry, it’s fair to say that many areas of game design are stuck in their ways: people know what they want, and designers try their hardest to…
Play Games, Help Science #2 – The Platformer Turing Test
Over at Niagara Falls right now CIG 2013 is taking place! CIG is always a great conference, and also home to the Platformer AI Competition results! The competition has many tracks, including level generation, but today…
Read more of Play Games, Help Science #2 – The Platformer Turing Test