We're too lazy to try and actually design levels so we're just gonna let a generator do it for us

>We're too lazy to try and actually design levels so we're just gonna let a generator do it for us

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This is done for 2 main reasons

1: For the sake of difficulty.
You can't just memorize levels to win, you have to actually get good at the mechanics and at resource management

2: replayability after you beat it once.

>Implying OP is looking for a discussion on the merits of game design and not just shitposting to start arguments

do you think all you need to create a generator is tell a computer "create a generator"?
youre talking out of your ass.

Well designed levels are both challenging and have high replay value. "Not having to memorize levels" is a copout and static level design does not preclude resource management.

shitposting, especiall in Sup Forums, is retarded. everyone is user, no one is anyone. whats even the point. all it creates is 9 out of 10 threads being a disappointment for anyone seeking an interesting thread here.

Realistically, a lot of developers do it thinking that it will be easier than designing a regular game, resulting in the huge glut of terrible indie roguelites on steam

Thank you, this guy gets where I'm coming from. I'm not against Rogue-likes being a thing, not at all. But when games of every genre imaginable are trying to incorporate them it starts getting really tiresome.

this twisted game needs to be reset

>"Not having to memorize levels" is a copout

Not at all. It keeps the decision making component of gameplay fresh. Otherwise it would diminish as a player works closer to a "best" course of action.

That said, procedural generation basically only works for Dungeon Crawls
Trying to stick it in other genres usually just results in really fucking uninspired levels

was someone implying any generator would produce good stuff? guess what, realistically, a lot of devs design "a huge glut of terrible indie games on steam" while hand crafting all levels.
the point of generators is to make infinite amount of levels that dont all feel like the 1 same room. its not supposed to have some Quake 3 level design or w/e game you think has good hand crafted levels.

And it is a lot easier (after you set it up the first time) than having to put effort into a well designed and interesting game. Instead of designing a dungeon with unique traps, puzzles, secrets, and interesting scenarios they can slap together a barebones jump and shoot or twinstick style game. All the while pretending that people are interested or challenged by playing the room with 5 bats, the spike trap that inconveniently spawned in an unfair location, the secret room you access by tapping a painting in the gallery room present on every floor, or the same 5 puzzle/platforming areas again and again every single time they start the game.

I'm somewhat saddened that I inspired such little faith in others. I'm just not fond of the idea of randomizing elements in every other game.

That's the thing, when people start sticking it in platformers and first person shooters it starts bugging me.

>it's easier to make a complete level by yourself than to write a generator do it proficiently
T. retard who has no idea what he's talking about

rogue likes have no soul

Is Dungeon Crawl only good rogue-like?
What do you like?

I don't think I can name a single rng map game that I wanted to go back to. Games with well thought out levels are always better. always

I absolutely love generated content but I agree with this. I really wish the industry wasn't so fucky. Genre y doesn't have what genre x does? Let's mix them together and fucking botch both

...

Which is why they actively try to take yours

an actual good procedural level generator is harder to make than well designed levels
but most indie roguelikes just glue prebuilt rooms together anyways

>Well designed levels are both challenging and have high replay value
randomly generated content has more replay value than fixed content, it's not even a question

Also, writing a good random level generator is a fun thing to make compared to just making static levels.

>It doesn't have both hand-crafted and randomly generated levels
trash it goes

Many people who played a fuck ton of Diablo 2 will probably disagree with you.

>too lazy to try and actually design levels
Don't they have to design little parts of levels anyway? then they use a randomizer to stick them together

This is why Lufia 2 still has some of the best level design of any RPG

thats the lazy way to do it. real procedural generation involves generating the whole thing out of math and algorithms

That's the exact opposite of what I said. It takes time to put together a level generator but then you can just shove different rooms into it or different variables on higher levels, which is super easy. But it always feels like jumbled garbage. Making a cohesive experience is much more difficult and the people playing your game don't have the drastically lowered expectations that come with RNG level design.

Some people just don't understand what a generator does

Like because some RNG determined the sequence and structure of the rooms means the developer didn't have to put extra care for those rooms to look normal and well instanced

>im not fond of randomizing elements in every other game
you think youre not fond of that, but that's only because you don't know that every game has a multitude of randomized elements. almost every game. whether it be how a NPC moves, sometimes moving to the right than to the left, or having a certain damage range, or random loot which is awesome. "every other game" isn't a slightly close estimation to reality.

I can see now that you were actually looking for genuine discussion, but surely you can see why the original post created such a reaction?

making a generator that makes good levels is hard, making good fixed levels can be hard, making a shit generator or shit levels is easy

the point is making good things is hard and making bad things is easy, stop being a retard

"genuine discussion". ok. the dude doesnt want rogue likes to be anything other than the game "Rogue" is. thats nice. great discussion lol

Oh right, I forgot about Diablo. That might be the only one I really enjoyed and wanted to return to many times over. That's probably cause there's no platforming involved though, it's all your abilities, items, etc. In a game where the player is platforming, and taking damage is getting punishing, I'd say well thought out levels are better.

Yes, although honestly it was partly an attempt to draw eyes. Yes I clickbaited.

That's a really broad way of looking at it, but I guess I spoke too broadly to begin with. But more specifically I am talking about the "rogue-like" trend that's going on right now. I think part of what has me annoyed about this stuff was me recently picking up Shovel Knight and having a blast with it, but all too often I see other indie games that look interesting at first glance but keep falling back on the rouge-like thing.

For people confused about how procedural generation works.
Here's an example of a physical based level solver actually doing its thing.

>1: For the sake of difficulty.
lol

are you sure this webm isn't a joke? it's gluing pre-built rooms together in the least efficent way possible. that's a terrible level generator

Have you ever played Rogue?

Level design isn't game design though. It's puzzle design since puzzles are designed with a finite amount of solutions.

It's an actual level generator used by an actual dev team.
It's from Spire which is made by the DustForce devs
Maybe they'll go with a different generation method before the game is actually released, I don't know.

No he wanted it to not be as overbloated as it is. He also brought up the notion that it could possibly be tied to laziness, which in turn promoted discussion.

...

not all levels are built with the intention of having a finite number of solutions

Yes. Tons of times. And actual roguelikes even more, but that doesn't suddenly make it difficult, unless the RNG gods feel like fucking with you for today.
I'm certain the OP is talking about rogue""""""""likes"""""""""" from Steam with very simple deviations.

>I'm certain the OP is talking about rogue""""""""likes"""""""""" from Steam with very simple deviations.
I am, actually.

>2: replayability after you beat it once.
Except that randomly generated maps are boring as fuck as opposed to well-designed levels that are actually fun to play again and again.

I think the point he's making is that RNG levels prevent you from knowing what you're going to find beforehand. Most true roguelikes lose almost all of their tension with a consistent seed.

>NO MAN'S SKY HAS INFINITE CONTENT DUUUDE IT'S A WHOLE UNIVERSE
>DUUUUUDE BORDERLANDS 2 HAS A GAZILLION GUNS!!!!
Nah, all it takes is a few runs to see how predictable the limited generation is. It's the equivalent of writing a book series by putting words into mad libs.

Honestly I'd rather see endless modes as an alternate end-game thing than the main aspect of a game.

A lot of the time procedural content isn't all that good and gets glued together in really meh configurations.

The only time procedural content really works is when there's a metric fuckton of variables added to the game world (dwarf fortress, CDDA).

>Nah, all it takes is a few runs to see how predictable the limited generation is.
the predictability and depth of procedural generation depends entirely what the developer puts into it. Labelling all procedural generation as bad just because you've seen it done badly is retarded.

>randomly generated level thread
>no mentions of 4x games or Homm 3

>have to make the generator instead
Way to defeat the purpose

randomly generated content is the reality tv to Dark Souls' House of Cards.

>Exploring an environment that's never been experienced by anyone before. A unique world.

versus

>Exploring a world designed for your convenience. Going to Disneyland.

I think I know what I prefer.

I think he's leaning more towards how many indie devs resort to being inspired by roguelikes (lol) and making a half-baked procedural map generator for the illusion of deep replayability, when in reality it's the same room #5 over and over and over and over again, but the rock or tree is in a different spot, and the enemy is in a different general area, while actual good roguelikes will tend to have many layouts, enemies, and such mixed in. It doesn't help that many of these Steam roguelites are 3D, therefore are even more limited by time and money. Even the 2D roguelites can get rather predictable like Rogue Legacy.

>implying this hacked together piece of shit isn't an abomination made by devs with no inkling of how to actually code

Here's an actual good example from one of the best generators in the industry.

youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0

That's because in those games it feels natural and fair and not shoehorned in.

Games like risk of rain do the whole procedural thing without being shit.

>We're too lazy to try and code a generator so we're just gonna draw some lines on a grid

why do people still tag roguelites as "roguelike" even though "roguelite" exists because people called anything and everything that had permadeath and RNG a "roguelike"?

It's pretty hellish to get those algorithms right though.

Imagine if the rooms in Binding of Isaac were procedurally generated too, it wouldn't be pretty.

>Rogue-like

What a dumb "genre". Same as Metroidvania and Soulslike.

user... calling RNG doesn't take effort

>It's pretty hellish to get those algorithms right though.
it's not
it's not difficult, and it's an art, one that hasn't been explored enough in video games, and most indie game programmers are behind the curve to be honest and haven't even scratched the surface of what you can do with proceduralgeneration. Binding of Issac rooms wouldn't be hard, but kind of pointless seeing it's probably faster to make them yourself

There's a very well defined genre inspired by Rogue. Grid movement, simultaneous round based movement, permadeath (though kind of optional; though I'm probably going to get crucified for saying that), proceduraly generated, key based inventory, macguffin (kind of option, too), and such.

>rogue-like
>it isn't anything like rogue

Really tangles my ties

It's a subgenre. Blame the casuals and talentless indie devs for bastardizing the definition.

The only real problem with it is that the term has been heavily bastardized because pretty much every recent game with the tag only shares some really basic similarities.

Roguelite would be a much better term if people stuck with it, but it also doesn't really matter a lot.

And thus roguelite was born, a shame no one wants to use it, because it's not as marketable for your HARDCORE game to be categorized as "lite."

Good thing Bloodborne has both.

>"real" procedural generation

Procedural generation has sprinkled pre-made bits randomly since at least the days of NetHack.

Could I get an example? I'm under the assumption that all levels have a finite amount of solutions. On a simple game like a platformer there's only so many ways you can jump over the same pit. Procedural generation ideally gives you more replay value because it continually generates levels with a finite amount of solutions. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making a value judgement here. One thing I value in hand crafted levels is the feeling of communication with the designer. Great games make me feel like I'm getting to know someone and give me the feeling of "oh you're trying this joke again it got me the first time but I know what you're up to now"

how about roguecore then

By "getting it right" I don't just mean having an algorithm that works, I mean having an algorithm (for procedural room generation) that makes the game actually fun, balanced, and interesting.

Edmund & co. had a hard enough time making enough rooms that weren't dogshit as is, so I'm not convinced it would be easy to get it right.

That makes it sound even more like Rogue than like roguelike.

I wish people would just call most of these games for what they are: dungeon crawlers.

Isaac is a bad candidate for procedural level generation anyway. Games with more freeform levels can do great things with procedural generation, but they haven't been done yet cause most indies are bad coders (and AAA devs wont try anything new of course)

retarded, as is roguelite.

Just call the fucking games what they are: Platformers, top down shooters, first person shooter, etc.

Saying a game is a roguelike because it has one or two elements lifted from the genre is as retarded as saying Gears of War is a first person shooter because it has shooting. Only, roguelike doesn't have the luxury of being self-explanatory.

It's understandable and acceptable in strategy games. People inherently know strategy needs variable every game or it'll get boring. People don't expect strategy elsewhere so it's frowned upon.

If that was the trend there would be some confusion with games like Wizardry or Etrian Odyssey which don't have permadeath (and not really all that similar in other ways either) and if they got mixed up with other games that are even less like dungeon crawlers than Rogue then it would be weird & annoying.

It's all one big tangled mess of confusion.

its really not difficult to understand what 'roguelikes' are

No I meant trying to steer people from misusing roguelike.

So don't make it worse?

Roguelite would be fine if people weren't retarded, but at least it doesn't matter very much since actual roguelikes aren't really being developed anymore anyways, or if they are then they're usually not on a platform like Steam because they'll just have their own small web site instead so there won't be weird mixups anyways.

yeah you might aswell give up we've been misusing the term "RPG" for 25 years now

I unironically believe the 90s as a whole harmed game design for decades. The solidifying of genres stopped 90% of developers from doing real game design work because they had tons of game design work done for them via genres. Questions like "how does the PC interact with obstacles" don't even get asked if they start from a genre. Not only that but players got conditioned to expect nearly all games to play like the accepted genres. Even things like the parries is MGS:R got criticism for the mildly unusual controls.

Games like BOF:DQ got ire simply because the devs decided to fix problems they perceived with the genre by questioning basic things like respawning enemies

nearly everything we play today was invented in the 90s though

>2: replayability after you beat it once.

I saw repetition in the layout of the levels in ziggurat after one playthrough. It's not truly random levels, it's developers putting their very limited assets on shuffle.

>replayability after you beat it once.
Holy shit I can't wait to see what boring as fuck, usually horribly horizontal arrangement of empty tilesets and passive buffs I'll get this playthrough! My dick is going to explode!

in other words..
Op >it would make video gaming wayyyyyy too complicated and difficult!

samefag
>greentext wanted

>Plays the victim
git gud

The definition is exactly what I have a problem with.
It's a whole genre trying to imitate a single game from the fucking 80's.

The people who "bastardize" it are actually trying to improve this old ass formula with only the good parts brought along.

I disagree with the terminology, I think it's a stupid term. But I love the mechanics behind most rogue-likes, in that they produce a solid amount of challenge and longevity, which you don't see anymore with most games. Today, most games are about the "experience", you "experience" the game like you do with a movie - with very little else to do besides follow a narrow path towards it's completion.
Rogue-likes are what games always used to be, to an extent. Interestingly enough I find myself getting less frustrated when I die/lose/fail in a 'rogue-like' than I do in an 'experience' game, which is interesting because I figured I would have the opposite reaction.

>shitty indie games that are not even actual roguelikes forever stained the name of the genre and the concept of procedurally generated levels as a whole, so now Sup Forums parrots the same opinion over and over

>he doesn't know Dwarf Fortress

As a wonderchild who's been passed between multiple game developers, I can tell you that this is not really the case.

Procedural elements enter where human power is not enough.

There's a lot of procedural things besides levels that aren't exactly handcrafted, even in AAA games - UVs on the 3D models, skinning, procedural animations, tile-less texturing, world geometry, parallax/normal maps etc.

Small indie devs don't have time or resources to put into designing tons and tons of levels, so they just create one script which does it for them.

I don't necessarily think this is a bad approach.

And ironically bloodborne FRC roots are the definitive hardmode content of the series, nothing beats them in terms of difficulty because there are no "tough but fair" memes, which is a retarded term almost as bad as artificial difficulty.

how's tough but fair retarded?