been reading through andrew doull’s posts on procedural generation. they are ancient but very good. been saving a lot of snippets of them
i’m going to lump in AI notes in this thread because i think it is a related concern. procedural denizens of procedural worlds, emergent behavior tied to emergent level design, etc etc. i really like this series i’ve been reading through this morning
it’s really refreshing to step away from AI as decision-trees or bayesian nets or weighted dijkstra maps (although those things are good and i will still be using them) and focusing on things that don’t actually make enemies “smarter” but more dynamic/reactive. i want to throw in a hundred hooks for battle banter. it has incredible mileage for charm and it’s more interesting to me at this point than necrodancer- or Ending-like pattern-exploitation (though obviously they are pretty orthogonal goals).