Toward Procedural Decorative Ornamentation in Games

Castles, palaces, temples and cathedrals in the real world are densely decorated with ornamentation. Computer games, in contrast, usually have much less and appear Spartan in comparison. Game worlds, whether hand-made or procedural, require greater decorative ornamentation to increase their realism and beauty. Currently artists create this ornament by hand; this doesn’t scale. In order to have more decorative artwork in games, procedural algorithms must be developed to generate it, for only this approach will create sufficient quantities, quickly, and at low cost. This paper justifies the importance of decorative ornamentation in computer games and provides an overview of existing research on algorithmic generation of patterns and ornamentation. A series of open research issues demonstrates the breadth of potential research that can be performed in this area. Together, these make the case that procedural decorative ornamentation is a new and interesting research subdomain within the area of procedural content generation for computer games.