Honours Project
This is a deep dive into my University Honours Project
Description
My Honours project was a study into the continued potential of Procedural Content Generation within 2D games. I wanted to take existing PCG techniques and apply something to them to energise them up for the creation of new type of Dungeon crawler levels. The idea I came up with was to hybridize existing techniques. For this I looked through a bunch of different techniques, existing powerful techniques like Cellular automata and even experimental techniques like using Markov chains for level creation.
When it came down to choosing the techniques, I couldn’t look past the obvious synergy between Cellular automata and Binary Space partitioning. Two techniques that create levels in very different ways but because of that, there was less perceived conflicts between the two. To put it simply: “Can I apply a version of the CA algorithm to create organic cave like structures to a collection of rooms and corridors created by BSP?” With the goal of producing algorithmically created levels made up of interconnected caves.
When studying the Computer Games Application development course at Abertay, procedural Content Generation wasn’t heavily covered, instead left for the Computer Games Technology course which was much more math and physics based in what it taught, aimed towards those who want to learn Game engine creation as opposed to just games programming. So, despite not having direct teaching for the subject I was still eager to dive into Procedural Content Generation as a new learning experience.