Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Procedurally Generated Pinkslips

Penny Arcade's recent podcast featured a rant - no... more of a reckoning... versus Spore. I find Spore's idea of dynamically generated content interesting, mainly because of my bias towards one-man development teams and procedurally generated content. But Mike and Jerry don't want to see artists and writers out of a job... and the concept that zombie algorithms can build music or images is looked upon with disdain. To them games are an artistic outlet for modelers, musicians and authors. But to developers they can seem like a growing necessity that a garage studio simply can't bankroll.

Eskil Steenberg's Love is described by Rock, Paper, Shotgun as "...lavish impressionistic artwork brought to life... in motion it was suggestive of a smokey, dynamically lit version of Okami." Dynamic terrain deformation and procedurally generated assets allow Eskil to wrap some amazing gameplay into what looks like a surreal and compelling atmosphere.

Not only does this mean that players get to glimpse into chaos, they get to play with it. And anyone who names such an ambitious effort after "For The Love Of Game Development" inspires hope in a lot of indie developers.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.