What I've Seen with Your Eyes

Eskil posted the video for his GDC presentations and they're abso-freakin-lutely amazing.

The gameplay of Love was interesting, but the video displaying the tools Eskil created are completely mind blowing. It's the stuff that actually gives you hope for the world again. The GDC tool video shows off several tools Eskil has released: Loq Ariou which allows you to create assets & models with the same ease as a pencil & scratch paper, Co On which provides scene mapping that's startlingly similar to how you might visualize things in your own mind, and Verse, a data transfer & protocol standard that allows such data to be shared instantaneously between applications.

Obviously Eskil had to create an intelligent set of tools to properly build Love within a decade, but I had no idea he had constructed such a cadre of tools that could be re-used by other developers. Not only does he speed content generation up and provide better interfaces - he goes one step further by breaking down human factor boundaries that plague every other asset generation tool to date. Just watch the video - especially the portion demonstrating shaders in Co On - and you'll see why I'm going completely nuts over these releases.

Eskil is giving back a huge amount to the community at large with these tools, and is likely opening the doors for many, many others to creatively express themselves in ways that were once prohibitively difficult. Love isn't just creating a fanbase... it's creating a legacy.

Love for the Indie Developers

It was interesting reading GameSetWatch's interview with Love's Eskil Steenberg. Was very cool to hear Eskil was good friends with the garage developers at Introversion. Interesting also to hear his opinions on procedurally generated content.

Eskil is developing Love entirely on his own, and using procedurally generated content to generate what he needs for something of such a vast scope was a necessity. Introversion is familiar with this same issue - you can see its effects in Darwinia.

Would be a nice thing to get back into.

Introversion's Procedural Art

The huge amount of effort required for content creation was a hot topic a couple of years ago, as many people saw the enormous cadre of artists and animators making AAA titles and realized no garage developers could hope to reach that type of scale. The fear at the time was that this would mean the end of indie development.

Of course after Peggle, Portal and Crayon Physics hit the mainstream it suddenly became apparent bigger doesn't equal better. Or more sales.

I've always loved the approach Introversion has taken with development. They're truly dedicated garage developers, spending more time trying to perfect a fractal tree than they really should. But I can respect spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wrap ones head around a concept like procedurally generated landscapes.

When I heard that Gamasutra was hosting an event with Chris Delay speaking on the topic of procedurally generated content, I definitely wanted to jump on the opportunity. While they had a fairly unrehearsed HP shrill asking the questions, Chris had some great points.

Chris emphasized that the main reason his titles have procedurally generated textures and meshes was because artistic content is just not a space he feels Introversion can compete within, since other companies have mastered that area. He saw it as neither a positive or negative thing, it's just the case for Introversion. Should artists be afraid? Chris doesn't think so. Procedural content cannot replace people, since it ultimately can't produce those unique items that make an environment distinct. While you can generate the landform that the world consists of (mountains, hills, streets, clouds, etc) it cannot add fine-grained details to the world.

You automagically gain several efficiencies with procedural content:

You don't have to re-draw or re-generate a scene if you need to modify level of detail

You end up with a large amount of content and detail that artists can't get (you can delve as deep as you want into a fractal)

If you do procedural animation, you can have adaptive animations that exist as a consequence to a number of actions

While the idea of using fractal algorithms for landscape generation or building trees, I hadn't thought much about procedural animation. Of course Spore uses it for their character builder, but introducing this as a new way of rigging meshes would again immensely help developers. Not needing an entire team of dedicated animators or texture artists would make things much more palatable.

There are tradeoffs of course, and Chris repeatedly mentioned that procedurally generated content requires a different way of thinking about memory management. Rather than loading assets off disk, you load them in memory at runtime - so you don't worry about texture compression, but you do now have to worry about LOD given to your algorithm and how much memory the resulting data structure will reside within. You can't let your procedure go willy-nilly and create too many verts.

Introversion's latest undertaking, Subversion, sounds interesting. Right now Chris describes it as more of a thought experiment, so who knows if we'll actually see it. But what he's pursuing is procedurally generating cities from 10 kilometer view all the way down to pens and desks inside a building. Not only does this employ a landscape generator for hills and mountains, but also will procedurally generate streets and buildings based on markets and traffic demand. Each procedural algorithm feeds its brothers, affecting its ultimate output. For example, more traffic makes more roads which can make bigger buildings.

One difficulty Chris found with this approach was that it was often ard to find out bad results - sometimes you would have cities being built on entirely one side of an area, with another being completely blank. Or sometimes a fire escape would open into nothingness on 30th floor. It's all a matter of finding a way to re-seed or compensate when these failures occur. Or maybe it just makes the whole concept quaint.

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.