Image: Procedurally Generated Spellbook Sprites by Spencer Egart.
One of my favorite events of the year is ProcJam, a game jam about creating things that generate other things. It’s slogan is “Make Something That Makes Something!” It’s super fun and I participated this year with my project Alea City One which you can play here or buy the source code and music files for here. For the past three years ProcJam has released alongside the jam a zine called Seeds, edited by Jupiter Hadley and Dann Sullivan. This year I contributed a short article about the design thinking behind my Unity asset Strata, a 2D level generator. For me the idea of tools which generate things with a degree of unpredictability or indirection is one of my great interests. Perhaps it goes back to my Borgesian obsession with infinities. Or perhaps it’s just my love for playing with systems, and seeing what they do and seeing the outline of their rules expressed through their output.
Seeds this year is 150 pages long and consists of 43 short articles, meditations and musings on the topic of procedural generation. Many, many great people have contributed and if you’re even remotely interested in this intersection of art, software and randomness I highly recommend you check it out. There’s a great variety of ideas and approaches on display, from text based procedural jewelry exhibitions, to the wonderfully titled ‘Islands Are Just Mountains Up To Their Necks In Ocans: Parts 1 & 2’ to a piece on ‘Procedurally Generated Spellbook Sprites’ which is the image I used for this post.
The zine is free to either read online or download as a PDF. A big thank you to the entire team behind ProcJam for organizing a wonderful community and event, and for allowing us to participate in and enjoy this fascinating publication.
