Generative design

Member lesson

Where generative systems go wrong

Lesson 9 of 10 in Generative design.

Practical Procedural Generation for Everyone · GDC Festival of Gaming
Lesson

The failures are consistent. A system with too many free parameters produces variety that reads as noise. A system with too few produces ten thousand near-identical instances and the variation is wasted. And a system with no constraint on its worst case will eventually generate something that ends up in a newspaper.

Seen from low down, a long conveyor carries hundreds of similar patterned tiles from a machine toward an open street door. One tile near the door is jagged and misshapen, and a person reaches to catch it before it slides outside.
Hundreds come out fine. Test for the one that doesn't, before it reaches the street.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Ten thousand variations that all look the same. The commonest failure.”

    • Rule
    • Constraint
    • Sameness
    • Invariant
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A system that can produce something unacceptable. It eventually will.”

    • Emergence
    • Parameter space
    • Unbounded output
    • Container
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A technique that stops being interesting once everyone has seen it.”

    • Emergence
    • Parameter space
    • Novelty decay
    • Container

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