Programming Languages and Compilers Commons^™

Procedural Generation: An Algorithmic Analysis Of Video Game Design And Level Creation, Logan Bond

Honors Theses

Procedural generation is a method for generating mass quantities of data algorithmically rather than manually. One perfect example of this is the recently famous No Man’s Sky, a video game where the entire marketing scheme was structured around its procedurally generated universe. The game’s trailer and advertisements promised its players 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets[1], all of which were procedurally generated. In other words, the developers did not create exclusive profiles for every single planet, but instead programmed the game in such a way that the planets were built from the code. This method of content creation is the …