All good things have come to an end. (Unless they are procedurally generated, I guess.) 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 German 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. This is the fifth and final of a series of diminuitively nicknamed "footnotes", and we saved themaddest madness for the end: Michael Cook designed "Angelina", an artificial intelligence which can design games.
Hint: Not only is this interview, as Cook himself mentioned, "incredibly thorough". It also starts withough much exposition. If you want to get a general idea of what Cook and Angelina do, you might first want to read the articles by Lewis Denby or Joe Martin which deal with the more basic aspects of the project. If you're feeling more adventurous, however, you can dive right in -- I promise there are no random monsters and no permadeath lying in wait.
While I have a basic understanding of what your ANGELINA is about, do you maybe have a short standard description of the project and your role in it?
ANGELINA is a PhD project investigating ways that software can autonomously build videogames that are fun, innovative and meaningful. I’m the sole contributor to the project’s code, although I’ve been fortunate enough to have excellent supervision and guidance from Simon Colton and some really informative analysis and experimental design help from Jeremy Gow. Jeremy and I work in Simon Colton’s Computational Creativity Group.