#procjam

[wigc]

Make Something That 'PROCJAM 2024' Something

Wanna make a game? Perhaps participate in a game jam to impose some sort of time and/or theme restriction on the project? Well, then... PROCJAM 2024 might not be what you're looking for, as this one is about... making something that makes something. It can still be a game, although chances are most will be deviating from that... norm.

Continue reading

[fern-fully]

Playing around with making a procedural island generator

[eccentric-nucleus]

it actually has been pretty interesting to see the interaction between procgen stuff and the new ai-generated craze. like procgen as a technique is generally about... using a bunch of different techniques together, with some human-authored stuff to hook things together, to make something interesting. caves of qud, for example, has a static, fixed overworld but procedural terrain, and between the different cave-generation algorithms, generators for different biomes, WFC for ruins, handmade setpieces, probably some other generation stuff for villages etc it's a total melange of procgen techniques applied in different ways for different purposes.

what i find interesting about the hype surrounding ai-generated stuff is the degree to which it's being presented as a one-size-fits-all technique? forget making a tectonic plate sim mixed with perlin noise curved based on biome templates to make some random terrain. ai will just Make A Landscape* (* note generative-ai is not currently capable of producing the data structures needed to actually usefully construct a landscape). speedtree has been around for decades but it doesn't Solve Generation; it's a specific tool for a specific purpose, rather than a big-picture Solution for everything.

like the maxim of procgen taking longer to produce worse output than making things by hand is so well-known as to be a cliche in procgen spaces. people are just enchanted by the thought of generation. somebody in the procjam discord i'm in said like, the thing about people interested in procedural generation is that they're generally interested in the specific algorithms used, not just the output. it's an artist's community, in the sense that they're interested in the process. and the process for generative-ai stuff is currently just like "this is unknowable". it's a particularly weirdly-tuned markov chainer, or something, who knows.

so it's not so much as there's friction there, so much as... sure sure if you want to use generative-ai for a project in practice it is going to be one tool in a toolkit of many different algorithms and techniques. and that is so divorced from the hype around generative ai that it's just a completely different conversation? like the actual use-cases for ai generation for hobbyists are like "i need a splash screen" "i need a bunch of generic and not particularly unique elf faceshots". these ai models are not out here automatically uv-mapping 3d models to generate randomized creatures or w/e. maybe one day they will be, but that would be a fundamentally different kind of thing

[totemsp2]

Wait, didn't I remake this game in 2015 and use it as a basis for a few assignments in TAFE, eventually using it to enter PROCJAM 2016?

[hydralisk98]

Blackhand (desktop GUI addventure...) & LibreVast (first person perspective game)

INSPIRATIONS:

Mapenmounde 2023;

Court Intrigue 2023;

Zach-like 2023;

Conlang 2023;

Open World Jam 2023;

LSDJAM 2023;

PROCJAM 2023;

(Open Source) Game Off 2023;

Cosmic Heat Death & Mothfolk motifs?;

Solarpunk Optimism;

Historically-derivations but with Civilization 5 & Stellaris flavorings;

Divine Intervention (angels, demons, devils, feywild...);

Prompt?: Transparent 'GLOSS' comforting cozy-solarpunk communal culture for creative handsome Lisp users; "Truth Attracts Like" = (Tal);

Sasha= Fish+Es shell;

Perseus= ZealOS + Parade + Inferno (Plan9 Embedded OS);

DIS= Sandbox-ed Limbo VM?;

Innu-Lisp= Common Lisp?;

Van= Nim / Limbo / Zig / C (2023 revision);

Maskoch= Little Black Bear Cub Mascot;

VUE= KDE+CDE desktop environment;

KEX= micro-kernel TROPIX nucleus;

INMOS= GNU Coreutils + Hurd;

MATRA = hyperlink decentralized wiki network;

ECM= Electric Computation Machines, IBM-eq.;

Macroware= Microsoft eq.;

Pflaumen= Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC);

Utalics= Symbolics;

COS= Commodore Open Systems;

AROS= Amiga Research Operating System;

GLOSS= Gratis Libre Open Source Software;

UDO= New physical data storage medium;

[theonixie]

My submission for ProcJam2022 is finally here! It’s a fun little creative tool for coming up with new character designs. A lot of the results remind me of robots and knights and other interesting stuff, but you can tune a lot of the parameters to change the appearance. Also includes the source code!

Some examples of what it can produce:

If you happen to make an OC design based off of a generated result, please tag me because I want to see it! I like watching the things I make help inspire others

[procedural-generation]

Li'l Taffer

I have a taxonomy I use to determine which games made the biggest impression on me. The highest category is "games which I have incorporated into my dreams" and it is fairly rare that a game gets added to that list. One of the first games on that list is Thief: The Dark Project, and if you're going to tell me that you made a Thief-inspired stealth game with procedurally-generated levels that will of course catch my attention.

Thus when David Lindsey Pittman's 7DayFPS/ProcJam game crossed my path, Li'l Taffer caught my attention.

It definitely captures the vibe of Thief, though the procedurally-generated levels made me think about how much of the original game is about learning the layout of buildings and how architecture works. So while the levels do have the feel of some of the more surreal Thief maps, they lack the hand-placed coherency that the original game relied on.

There's ways Li'l Taffer could have mitigated this. There's already some logic to the way that some rooms are constructed (libraries and bathrooms and the like) but I think a generative project needs to go harder on signaling to the player what is going on. We can't rely on the presence of a human sensibility in the level designer, so that sensibility needs to be encoded into the level generator in a very visible way. Or, it could have gone the other direction, and played up the surreal nature of the levels. They are, after all, designed by an alien intelligence intruding into our dimension (i.e. an AI level designer).

In the event, the rules of Li'l Taffer as a game make bad situations recoverable, using the Thief approach to dealing with partial failure margins and applying it to generated content, similar to the shovel in Crypt of the Necrodancer. Which is a good reminder that the fixes for weaknesses in your generator don't necessarily need to be in the generator itself. In this case, the gameplay is about recovering from the difficult situations the level generator throws at you.

But ultimately, I was just happy it gave me the occasion to revisit Thief.

[regina-town]

My boyfriend (https://twitter.com/PhilippSeifried) and I made some procedurally animated dancing cats! Derp it up!

[sam-keeper]

My #procjam entry, A Tarot Reading, is now out for free on itchio! The game uses the #Bitsy engine, but hacked to allow for text randomization. Go have your spooky fortune read through the power of procedural generation.

[c-ntr-st]

A tiny procedural meditation made for PROCJAM 2019 with VueJS: https://balintmagyar.com/approach/

[ceruleanvulpine]

first ever twitterbot!! my bot child!!

me and rowan have a bit more work to do on our procjam project, but in the meantime, please appreciate this white collar episode summary bot i made. ultra-structured procedurals are perfect for parody, and white collar is such a cozy, pleasant, subtextually-gay-and-poly-to-a-comical-degree show which i love very much. 

and now that i have v1.0 up and running i am headed to bed. good night everyone!

[wigc]

Make Something That Something Makes That 'PROCJAM 2022'

Wanna make a game? Perhaps participate in a game jam to impose some sorta time and/or theme restriction on the project? Well, then… PROCJAM 2022 might not be what you're looking for, as this particular jam is actually about… making something that makes something. It can still be a game, although chances are most will be deviating from that… norm.

Continue reading

[glennmoreels]

All systems go~ now we have custom escape characters that allow you change the textcolor inside the same textblock for special keywords!

Now i know it may look easy but there’s a lot to it ^^’ anyway it should be mostly ready now.. unless.. i c yes.. that might work hmm

[eccentric-nucleus]

so procjam 2023 is spinning up and the maintainer asked the discord their opinions about allowing generative ai/llm-based submissions, since that's kind of the big hot-button issue wrt procedurally-generated content these days

i didn't really think it was reasonable to relitigate that entire thing on the server so instead i'm posting my thoughts here

i mean really it's not a super complex viewpoint i think. like. i write fanfiction. i do not think authors have any inherent right to maintain control over works that they publish to a public audience. have priority for commercial use? sure. so like, i don't fundamentally have any moral objection to people, like, scraping my fanfic so they can make a fanfic-making bot, tho given the current limitations of LLMs i can't imagine the output would be, you know, very good.

the people specifically prompting for outputs in one specific artist's style so they can have a constant feed of trite pablum in a fanciful style seems deeply insulting to that specific artist, and that seems pretty borderline wrt ethics, but it's still like, well, whatever.

what i do actually have a pretty strong moral objection to though is stuff like copilot, because that is transparently an attempt for a large corporation to extract values from the commons for their own private financial enrichment. once the use is no longer "people sharing models for fun to churn out weird stuff for their own amusement" and is instead "a huge corporation restricting access to their models so they can endlessly charge rent for people trying to use their model made out of other people's work" i start thinking hey that probably shouldn't happen. i feel like that's deeply unethical to use, actually

basically 'theft' on an individual scale is like, w/e, that's just people being people. 'theft' on the scale of 'corporate entities will restructure their business around this' is bad.

[rainxcat]

-one click world- my new coding adventure I guess. I am learning procedural generation and simulation. Applying it using Godot, so far I am satisfied with the results. Progress update: I'm nearly done with the environment and small UI(configure it while playing), now going to work on the simulation of animals. Suggest me a new if the name is too dull to you. Credit: background music by: fesliyanstudios.com Trees: devilsworkshop.itch.io To ignore: #godotengine #procedural #proceduralgeneration #procjam #simulation #indiegamedev (at India) https://www.instagram.com/p/CITFgZOJFJM/?igshid=6cccb4kyae3v

[humanhacks]

Prototyping something for the Procedural Jam.

http://procjam.com/