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 fourth of a series of diminuitively nicknamed "footnotes", I talked to Pwnee Studios, who released Cloudberry Kingdom last year. (If you want a more elaborate introduction, Pwnee's own Jordan Fisher and Julian Adams wrote two fascinating articles about the game and its use of procedural generation for Gamasutra.)
In your (excellent) in-depth article on Gamasutra, you described Cloudberry Kingdom in great detail. However, how would you describe it to an audience of non-industry people? Specifically, what sets Cloudberry Kingdom apart from other sidescrolling platformers with an emphasis on procedural generation, such as Spelunky?
If we were to describe Cloudberry Kingdom to a casual group of people, we would likely describe it as a game like Mario 3, but harder…and it never actually has to end. It’s a platformer that has an infinite number of randomly generated levels. The thing that sets us apart from other procedurally generated platformers is our emphasis on action, rather than being a puzzle-type adventure. What we really aimed for with Cloudberry Kingdom was a game that was mindless fun, something that you can play for hours on end without really exhausting yourself. In every classic platformer we have played in the past, we were disappointed when it ended. Since we were kids, we wanted to be able to play a platformer that would never have to end, so we made one!