Game Developer On Best Practices For ProcGen In Commercial Games

Alexander Birke, the developer of Sea of Rifts, a naval roguelike RPG with procedural storytelling, shared insights from his team's hands-on experience in creating the game's world, levels, characters, and narrative, presenting an extensive talk during Roguelike Celebration, an annual community-driven event dedicated to talks, games, and discussions about roguelikes and related topics.

In this video, Alexander explores procedural generation in the context of a commercial game, emphasizing that the time required to develop a generator and how easily non-technical team members can integrate content into it are just as important as the quality of the generated output. He also shares advice on how to structure your procedural generation system for easy expansion and how to set up an effective testing workflow, allowing the entire team to test their content.

Moreover, he also demonstrates how iterating on level generation led to the use of signed distance fields for island creation in the project, ensuring it met the gameplay requirements. The talk concludes with a showcase of the custom tools and workflows Alexander developed to help his team seamlessly integrate art and story content into the game's generation process.

Wishlist Sea Of Rifts or join the playtest here and check out some resources to get started on the subjects recommended by the developer:

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