Recently Rainer tried to introduce the readers of Der Standard to the wonders of procedural generation with this article, but I had already plunged the further depths of this topic in last year's article for games publication GameStar. During my extensive research, I conducted a series of in-depth interviews with a few notable game designers on procedural generation in games today. In this interview, the second of a series of diminuitively nicknamed "footnotes", I talked to Jim Rossignol, game journalist extraordinaire and head designer at BIG ROBOT.
Let’s kick it off with a blunt question for the developer in you: If you would have had the resources, would you have preferred using hand-crafted terrain and landscapes for Sir, You Are Being Hunted? Or, to put it differently: Was procedural generation more of a means to an end or a central aesthetic choice?
There's a lot to be said for hand-crafted worlds, and in all honesty I would love to see a big studio approach the sort of game that we're making with a huge team of artists and level designers. That said, when these big studios do make open worlds - Skyrim, Far Cry 3 for example - they use those teams of artists to build on procedurally-generated landscapes. The results of this is often fantastic, and I think the future is probably a mix of the two approaches. Even our approach is a mixture, one limited by our small budget. There's something enormously powerful about procedural generation tools, and the true extent of its power has not yet been explored. Consequently the true potential of a mixed approach has not been explored. Exploring the depth and extent of that power is something that interests both me and our lead programmer, Tom Betts.