Comment by ramly

2 years ago

> how come you felt the need to procedurally generate levels?

Three reasons: (1) demand for new levels was too high - game traction exceeded my laziness threshold as a designer; (2) puzzle lovers suffered from lack of replayability - game was effectively punishing core users who engage with it the most; (3) designing a 'good' difficulty curve required me to quantify a level's difficulty objectively - anytime I design a puzzle or strategy game, I also try to design an algorithm that can solve it to get a general sense of how the different levels compare in difficulty; (4) I tend to get obsessively curious about stuff - wasn't sure if it's feasible to have a 100% real-time procedural gen of chess mazes so I decided to do it to find out.

> I've often heard debates around whether content needs to be "hand-crafted" to be worth another human's time

LLM jokes aside, I think this is a great point and I'm not sure exactly what the right answer is here. I ended up keeping both Classic and Endless modes for this exact reason. If there's enough interest, I'll add a manual level generator for the community of 'humans' to submit their own hand-crafted creations for others to play.

> a general set of principles to procedurally generate levels that apply to games outside of echo chess?

Good question. I think it really comes down to this: (a) can you formalize the concept of a 'level' and its components for your game in a way as to encode/decode every game state (at a minimum) easily and efficiently? (b) can you parametrize this formalism in a way as to connect malleable randomizations to every meaningful component of a level to generate (hypothetical) infinite variability? (c) do you have a confident way to make sure whatever generation of a 'level' you're churning out is as playable, achievable, and as fun as the manually crafted one? The fun part is the hardest one to automate. That's where I think you need a very strong grasp of what actually make your puzzle game fun. All the rest can likely be generalizable to other games.

> puzzle designers would burn out before they create a few dozen-hundred levels