Designing Procedural Game Spaces: A Case Study

Procedural content generation holds many promises for the design, art, and production of video games. It also poses a number of challenges. This paper concentrates on the procedural generation of game spaces. We specifically argue for a connection of a player’s agency with the procedural world generation. First, space generation in games is broken down into four main approaches: designercreated, random, player-created, and procedural spaces. Then, the paper introduces our experimental game prototype Charbitat that merges these four stages and provides a practical case study. Charbitat generates game worlds based on the gaming style of its players, who create the world as they play it. We describe how the project met the challenges in design and implementation. Finally, we point out new questions opened up by the project and relevant for procedural content generation.