Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry

Abstract

While the games industry is moving towards procedural content generation (PCG) with tools available under popular platforms such as Unreal, Unity or Houdini, and video game titles like No Man’s Sky and Horizon Zero Dawn taking advantage of PCG, the gap between academia and industry is as wide as it has ever been, in terms of communication and sharing methods. The authors have worked on both sides of this gap and in an effort to shorten it and increase the synergy between the two sectors have identified three design pillars for PCG using mixed-initiative interfaces. The three pillars are respect designer control, respect the creative process and respect existing work processes. Respecting designer control is about creating a tool that gives enough control to bring out the designer’s vision. Respecting the creative process concerns itself with having a feedback loop that is short enough, that the creative process is not disturbed. Respecting existing work processes means that a PCG tool should plug in easily to existing asset pipelines. As academics and communicators, it is surprising that publications often do not describe ways for developers to use our work or lack considerations for how a piece of work might fit into existing content pipelines.