Procedural Generation in Game Design 1st Edition

Great for the variety of applications for PCG that it covers.It does warn you early into the book to not expect every problem to be solved instantly by PCG (a fair message) and it doesn't dig into the technical implementation details beyond a surface discussion.This is NOT a technical recipe book for building a bunch of different PCG systems you can use in games.Great starting point if you're interested in learning about PCG in other ways than you've already been exposed to.The variety of authors is very beneficial since each topic has its complex gotchas. It feels as if the authors talking about subjects have grappled firsthand with the problems that you'd face within that topic.The only minor fault is some of the charts don't line up with where you'd want them to be: 'As seen in Figure N-1' and Figure N-1 would turn out to be on the next page.

If you’re looking for a clear and comprehensive overview of procedural generation methods, algorithms, and implementations, this is not the book for you. This is not a handbook on procedural generation. Instead, this is mostly a bunch of essays from developers that explain how they used it in their work. There’s some interesting stuff to be learned here for sure, but if you’re a beginner, this will not remotely give you the building blocks to start making stuff.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAmazing. I love this book, I wish I had bought the hardcover because I want to reread this book over 20 times. Procedural Generation is a passion of mine and this combines many techniques I had never thought about. It will not give you "code" don't look at this book and want somebody to give you code, or even answers to your solutions. Procedurally generated content is a discussion not a one size fits all and this book shows many sides to that discussion. I believe they could write 20 more books on this same topic and techniques others have used and I would buy every single one. Thank you!

I heard about this book on Roguelike Radio and had to get it. I've been following the editors for years and a good chunk of the contributing authors. If you have an interesting in game programming or procedural generation then this is a great book to read. Perfect mix of high and low level concepts.My only complaint is that I wanted to read essays from Tanya and Tarn too!

Great little vignettes into many different aspects of procedurally generated content!

Great book. Lots of good little bits of information.

This is not really a book that I can suggest to most people. The first portion is actually not one but a series of essays trying to warn you away from using proc gen, and then finally once they begin to talk about proc gen it's generally given in relatively vague outline terms, not actual code examples. This is "good" in the sense that it doesn't promote a particular language some might say, but people using their language of choice to write a game can generally convert from simple Python or Java or whatever into their own language, so actual code examples would have been much preferred. The fact that each chapter is written by a different author makes the writing style jump all over the place in a way that took quite a bit away from the experience for me.

This is a collection of essays from experts in the procedural generation world, people who live and love (and fight) procedural generation in many different forms. While this book isn't a practical, down-in-the-code-weeds tutorial, that isn't the point of the book. It is chock-full of ideas, theory and inspiration for game designers and people combining art and code.I've learned an awful lot from this book despite being keen on procgen for many years. It's given me ideas on how to approach problems myself. i thoroughly recommend it. I keep dipping into different chapters, finding something new each time.