Link of the day: Procedurally speaking...
Remember that link where I spoke about different algorithms? I made a quick reference to Pixel City. If you had the chance to see it, and furthermore, if you have had the chance to download it and test it yourself, you might have seen that for a really little binary executable we can get really great things.
That’s because of content procedural generation, this means that the data you see is not configured or saved anywhere, it is just created in the moment that it is needed, with a set of rules that make sure that the result is close as expected.
Of course, this isn’t something new, lots of games already make use of this technique and not even that, there are a couple of games made entirely on this fashion. You should check out .kkrieger, a 96k 3D full level FPS game. That’s right. 96k.
You should also check Synth, an almost 100% procedural generated game, where even the music is generated in real time.
There’s also a nice experiment with procedural animation and genetic algorithms called Creepy Crawlies. In this application, you can create a creature with a certain configuration of bones (fixed length), claws (points it can grab on to) and muscles (parts it can expand/collapse), and the genetic algorithms will make it evolve so it grows up to the best locomotion technique. The animation is done procedurally too.
I’m a generated little skunk.