Anyway, moving on. Ive been really into structural and formal artwork for years, particularly early computer art and minimalist works by artists such as Sol LeWitt, and in an attempt to decorate my rather spartan walls I decided to generate a few systematic prints using code and pixels. I used unity and jsut made a few simple iterative scritps that write into a texture and then save the resulting texture as a png/gif.

The first peice is a recreation of a computer art work based on all the possible moore neighbourhood combinations.

The next is all the linear steps of a 0-255 sequence in binary

Then Ive tried a few variations on the nine-square quilting pattern, using every combination of 4 tile types.
The following tests are at different seperations for each ninetile group.

These images were originally produced pixel accurate as really small gifs, I had to scale them up carefully (without any bilinear filtering etc) so they could get large enough to print but without losing the sharp definitions of the individual pixel forms. On the whole they came out pretty well, I might post an image of the final framed versions when i get a decent shot.

Procedural / Generative / Modular – grow yourself a game (Unity)

When programmer art sucks and real artists do everything with ten million polys, how can a lone coder get anything done! In this talk
Tom will show how a procedural & generative methods can help drive content production and game design in engines like Unity. Tom will show a number of his own projects and prototypes where modular and generative design have helped overcome the problems of content production. He will also probably go hideously off topic and end up talking about Dark Souls, Honey and Deleuze.

Tom Betts, aka Nullpointer, is an artist, academic, coder and gamer. He’s been a lecturer, designer, published musician, professional
artist, warlock…. but right about now he is working on his Phd about the sublime in digital games and he’s also head coder at Big Robot making a game for Channel4. Hes exhibited digital artworks and performed at international venues such as Sonar, ZKM, Lovebytes, FACT and has done professional design/coding for Tate, the V&A and the Southbank Centre. He likes coding indie projects, drinking coffee, watching films where nothing much happens and is trying to grow a beard.

In many ways Dark Souls reminds me of another of my favourite games, Monster Hunter, which Ive written about previously. In both these games, death can come quickly if you aren’t paying attention, and the mastery of your chosen skillset is essential if you want to progress. Dark souls provides a reasonably wide range of different offensive options, from tanking approaches to ranged weapons and magic. All of these choices expect the player to learn the skills and potential combos of their chosen path.

As with Monster Hunter, different weapons have different movesets and can also provide opportunities to parry, counter, stagger and inflict status effects. Picking your weapon,armor and style is part of what gives players in both games a real sense of ownership and agency. In parallel to Monster Hunter your chosen skill path is important, but often less vital than the ability to read and exploit the behaviour and attack patterns of the enemies. Even when highly levelled, it is still easy to die if you become careless, or try for that ‘one extra hit’. The resulting sense of danger (specifically in areas like blightown or the tomb of giants) generates a tense but rewarding experience. Dark Souls will kill you if it can, capitalising on any mistakes you make. But when you beat it the feeling of achievement is much greater than that in many easier mainstream games.

Another aspect of Dark Souls that makes it a refreshing change to the formats of many other RPGs is the hazy, dreamlike quality of its narrative. The lore of the world is never imposed through wordy cutscenes or in world texts, rather it is implied through the level designs themselves which are punctuated by lost and wandering NPCs. In a similar narrative style to the Silent Hill series these NPCs deliver fragmented and surreal backstories, of both their own journeys and the lore of the world. Just as in Silent Hill, the inhabitants of Dark Souls mirror the alienating and unknowable nature of their world, hinting at guidance but never quite trustworthy. Like Silent Hill, they reappear at different stages of the game, sometimes transformed or suddenly malevolent. Their personal arcane missions mirror the strange futility of your own quest and their abstract awe and fear of the world supports the general atmosphere of hidden purposes and uncertain goals.

Dark Souls never prioritises “the story” over “the game”, instead it treats the story as the world, as something that pre-exists and is there to be ‘read’ through exploration and sparse NPC driven exposition. The world is also a silent one, populated by mute enemies who forgo the battle shrieks of many games in favour of the unsettling clink of bones or chainmail behind you before a lethal stab (The quiet emptiness of Dark Souls castles and catacombs reminds me of Vagrant Story and its lonely streets). The rules of the game world even allow player actions that could seriously hamper narrative progression. Unlike Bethesdas work you can kill the NPCs, they dont just fall conveniently unconscious. After accidentally hitting a blacksmith, the affronted guy would attack me on sight whenever i ventured near his forge. You can pay for absolution to remove such sins, but the NPC who provides this is equally cryptic and obscure.

The ending cutscene (linking the fire), is possibly the shortest one in the whole game, finishing your playthrough with little resolution to the narrative and dumping you without ceremony back at the beginning of the game. This reflects Dark Souls attitude that the world and the process of playing within it is the story. Like STALKER, there is a powerful sense of autonomy in the game world, and like GSCs scarred wastelands there is also a real sense of loss in leaving this world. Because unlike most other linear script-driven cutscene games, the story isn’t there just for you “the player”, it feels like it is there despite of you, and will continue to be there long after you have turned the power off and walked away.

Abstract:
This paper will examine the relationship of pattern recognition and Gestalt principles to procedural form in gameplay. It will identify key features of pattern based play mechanics and outline important synergies between programming paradigms and procedural form. In the course of the paper I will examine the formal and aesthetic qualities of procedural structures and discuss how they generate the experience of psychological flow. I will also identify the role of these mechanisms and their effects in current game design.

Keywords:
Video Games, Computer Games, Emergence, Ludic, Procedural form, Generative, Digital Sublime, Programming

I’ve modified the roguelike dungeon generator from teh previous post into a system that builds procedural castle-like structures.
It basically fills in the gaps of the dungeon style layout with various tower block items. The system then randomly swops out a number of hard cube edges with customised ‘broken’ ones. It also optimises the mesh by only creating visible surfaces (ie no backfaces for adjoining towers etc) and then combining generated forms into larger more efficient meshes. The texturing is done with another version of my triplanar mapping shaders and the trees are default unity asssets dropped semi-randomly on appropriate surfaces. The whole thing is finally postprocessed through some shaders Ive deliberatley overdriven.

You can try this one out with the unity player here.

However I really wanted to see what the structures woudl look like in 3D, so i just altered a few elements. Basically the corridors and rooms are rendered as solid cubes, so it becomes more of a pathways and platforms design(over swamps, lava etc in a torchlight style). Then I made the pathways capable of rising up a certain amount for every cell, so they can link up the rooms/platforms that exist on other levels. Of course its not perfect as sometimes pathways wont rise enough and end up at dead ends, they can also cut rhough each other. But with a small amount of gameplay adjustments (characters able to jump or climb various surfaces) I think it woudl be fine. Anyway , its jsut a simp,e sketch at the moment, I might work on it in more depth, possibly adding LOD or more non-cubic rooms etc. Ive put some images below and a link to the 3D version here.