Procedural Content from Introversion

Ah Introversion - indie development's poster child. For those that don't know, they're an independent, self publishing, award-winning game developer.

The article comes from Game Career Guide and talks about procedural content and how the industry should shift towards it. Procedural content is the act of generating content dynamically through functions. In their examples, their next game generates the layout of a city given certain arguments. Roads and building attributes are based on population density, districts, and ground elevation. Entire cities are created by functions. What would take thousands of man hours for artists and level designers now took a few weeks of programming.

However, this is nothing new. At E3 last year, this was Will Wright's big concept in Spore. Everything from lifeforms to galaxies are all procedural. .kkrieger was able to pack an fps into 96 kb with graphics comparable to current gen shooters.

They go on to point out that they are not just talking about static models, but animation, and textures. Back to spore, the animals you create must be able to walk in a believable fashion without programmers knowing what you'll develop.

Like they said, with development costs and computing on the rise, the best way to fill vast virtual worlds will be with functions - especially for indie developers with limited resources.

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