Uploaded February 2021 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago
This talk is from the 2016 Roguelike Celebration: roguelike.club/event.html, re-uploaded 2021.
Procedurally generated content is great, but writing so much custom code becomes unwieldy and too many great projects die tangled-up in long chains of if-statements. Tracery, a popular and newbie-friendly generation tool, can keep data for procedural content generation separate from the gameplay code, while still generating neat stuff. The creator of Tracery demos a few neat tricks (no-hassle reskinning of RPGs and more!) and shows some hard-earned lessons for how keeping your data and code separate can make projects clean, maintainable, and fun to build.
Kate Compton is a long-time Procedural Content Generation (PCG) practitioner. She wrote the first paper on procedural platformer levels, generated the planets for Spore, and wrote the latest SimCity fire system. She is now a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz developing artificial intelligence to augment human creativity with generative art. She likes laser cutting, 3D printing, artbots, twitterbots, and baking.
This talk is from the 2016 Roguelike Celebration: roguelike.club/event.html, re-uploaded 2021.
Procedurally generated content is great, but writing so much custom code becomes unwieldy and too many great projects die tangled-up in long chains of if-statements. Tracery, a popular and newbie-friendly generation tool, can keep data for procedural content generation separate from the gameplay code, while still generating neat stuff. The creator of Tracery demos a few neat tricks (no-hassle reskinning of RPGs and more!) and shows some hard-earned lessons for how keeping your data and code separate can make projects clean, maintainable, and fun to build.
Kate Compton is a long-time Procedural Content Generation (PCG) practitioner. She wrote the first paper on procedural platformer levels, generated the planets for Spore, and wrote the latest SimCity fire system. She is now a PhD candidate at UC Santa Cruz developing artificial intelligence to augment human creativity with generative art. She likes laser cutting, 3D printing, artbots, twitterbots, and baking.
