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by nikitau 107 days ago
Roguelike/lites are is of the most popular genres of indie games nowadays. One of it's main characteristics is randomization and procedural generation.
1 comments

While there are many Roguelikes with procedural generation, I think the most popular ones do not. Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2, Hades 1/2, BoE etc are all handmade stages with a random order with randomized player powers rather than procedurally generated.
I've seen a couple roguelike developers report that they played around with procedural generation, but it was difficult to prevent it from creating dungeons that were bad, unfun, or just straight-up killscreens. Turns out it's often easier to simply hand-draw good maps than to get the machine to generate okay-to-good ones.

Procedural generation is good when variety matters more than quality, which is a relatively rare occurrence.

That says more about the developer than procedural generation as a whole. Using procedural generation IS difficult, it requires understanding how to set up constraints on your p-random generated elements and ensuring the code validates that you have a "good" level/puzzle/whatever before dumping the PC into it.