WHAT WERE THE ART TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES USED DURING DEVELOPMENT? We’d use sketchbooks and a scanner for our base, then we’d input into a style transfer AI to output the textures. After that, we bring it into Blender to model and rig before we import it into Unity.
certain conditions that are affected by the difficulty of the level as well. The procedural art is something I would call “offline procedural,” as we don’t generate the textures in real time. That would take too long. Instead, our tools compile beasts from an array of assets that fit the criteria for each level.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO USE PROCEDURAL GENERATION TECHNIQUES? I like to create worlds. It’s an interesting challenge. Dynamic worlds are even more fun. The reason I like game development is that it allows you to create what feels like organic life, with a host of unforeseen permutations. The way I like to look at it is that art is the body and programming is the soul of game worlds.
TO WHAT EXTENT IS PROCEDURAL GENERATION USED IN THE GAME? We use a simplified dungeon system that connects level chunks. We also procedurally generate the monsters with
DID YOU USE THE SAME TECHNIQUES FOR THE LEVEL GRAPHICS, BECAUSE THEY’RE JUST AS UNSETTLING AS THE MONSTERS? Yes, it is important to keep your style consistent in games to create believable worlds, although procedurally they are created differently. For the world, we also use a pathfinding dungeon generation system that we built and a more simplified socket connection system. This is to make sure you can complete the level and create enough variety, while also ensuring that it’s fun from a design perspective. For the monster, we use something we call the ‘monster stitcher’ that combines different monster parts according to dynamic blueprints and the list of body parts for a given level.
HOW DOES MACHINE LEARNING COMBINE WITH PROCEDURAL GENERATION, FROM A VISUAL PERSPECTIVE? We do have two parts here: Machine learning and procedural generation. We use the art
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