You don’t often see good comprehensive articles on procedural text descriptions, but here’s one:
Dang. (I was working on a procedurally generated roguelike project last summer, and felt pretty good about the progress I made, but this leaves me in the dust.)
Definitely an interesting read - thanks for sharing!
Whoa. You’d mentioned God Wars 2 before, but this really brings home how great this is.
Carolyn – I wanna see your project!
Never hit more than the prototype phase - it was mostly a project to keep me focused while learning C.
At the point where I left off, it generated a top-down ASCII-rendered world with text descriptions for rooms, with implementations of weather, time, biomes, forests, cities with shops (bakeries, cobblers, and clothiers, when I left off) and other landmarks, NPCs (to staff those minimally-implemented city features), cavern structures, and a quest system (containing only one example quest). You could pick up stuff, drop stuff, buy stuff in shops, beat the example quest, and forage leaves and fruit and things off the local vegetation.
It was hypothetically infinite in scope, barring system limitations, but in practice, you’d trigger a seg fault long before hitting your system’s limitations. Sadly, it seg faulted a lot.
The linked article reminds me of my design documents in some places, and goes significantly beyond them in others. It’s really interesting to see that someone else has gone so far in extensively and effectively fleshing out these concepts. I’m not much of a player-killer type (the game described above was actually intended to be noncombat) but I should wander around a bit and see what God Wars II is like.