The author of "50 Years of Text Games" dives into some of the very earliest PCG in games from the 70s and the dawn of home computers, from one-liner simulations of cold weather geography to lossy compression of galactic sector maps far larger than 2K of memory could hold.

The Banished Vault features heavily abstracted solar systems, but nevertheless has a large degree of exploration that combine multiple kinds of costs, terrain, and rewards. Designer Nic Tringali breaks down all the various components of the exploration model, discussing how some elements are inverted from typical models, and the ultimate design goals and player experience.

Roguelikes generate items, stories, worlds and names - but rarely rules. There's lots of good reasons not to do it - it feels weird, for one thing, and it's technically complex and unpredictable. But it can also be exciting, surprising and funny, and can lead to some amazing new challenges for players and designers alike. It's exactly the blend of generative chaos and technical creativity that people love about roguelikes. So how do you get started? Join me for a look into how generative design shapes rules, how AI can help, and why your next roguelike should design itself.

Data science explorations of the roguelike genre. Where is the best data? How do we get it? Where is the genre now and where is it going? How are player's attention spans evolving? In this talk we'll deep dive data strategy, what we can learn from the data, and how best to improve it.

Ah Sudoku--the logic puzzle where you fill a 9x9 grid with numbers. While most sudoku are computer-generated randomly, there is a growing community of variant sudoku constructors that make beautiful and brain-bending puzzles--all by hand. Let's explore the history of "hand-crafted vs computer-generated" from the perspective of this puzzle community. We'll cover the motivation, the beauty, and the tools of the trade of hand-crafted puzzles, and show how "hand-crafted vs computer-generated" is more of a spectrum than a binary.

How can we make games that are simple and focused, but still dynamic and varied?

In this talk I'll go over the process of designing my roguelike, Into Ruins -- how I took inspiration from one of my favourite games (Brogue), and how the technical & creative restrictions of developing for the PICO-8 fantasy console led me to some interesting design decisions that gave the game its own flavour.

Blaseball (2020-2023) was a massively multiplayer sports fan simulator that asked its online audience to follow a fictional, procedural baseball league's horror story across years -- as well as the hundreds of named digital outfielders who could die or spawn anew at a moment's notice!

Join Blaseball community manager & designer Elliot Trinidad in this practical retrospective about how a simple "first name, last name" character generator was able to illicit everything from obsession to controversy in the hands of a creative community. What do procedural character names say about your game's world? How did we tune our names to better highlight cultural diversity? And just what does it look like when seemingly small decisions get constant live feedback from an invested audience? Tune in to find out!

This presentation will explore how the traversal of virtual spaces in games can be used to procedurally remix or even generate music. I'll show how you can connect a game's coordinate system to concepts from music theory and psychoacoustics to create a subtle, spatial synaesthesia, wherein your players move through both physical and harmonic space.

My talk is about the difficulties you can encounter when building dynamic content selection systems for procedural dungeons, dynamic missions, and similar features.

Overcomplicating these systems is deceptively easy, but making them good enough to ship is hard.

I will be talking about the two core questions of any game feature or system (Does it work at all? and Is it good?), the advantages but also the limits of static analysis, the dangers of highly dynamic systems, and ideas for future directions for all this.

This talk will examine how riddles that are meaningful, obscure, and solvable, are procedurally generated in Ultima Ratio Regum. I believe this to be a first in roguelikes and in the talk I'm going to outline how the game a) procedurally generates its main categories of cryptic riddles, b) ensures that there is enough information for the player to decipher them, and c) generates and stores unique custom triggers through which they can actually be solved by performing each procedurally generated solution, and d) checks that there are enough ways to figure out the answer to a riddle, i.e. that the riddle is not unusually difficult or the riddle's key components are too rare or hard to find.

Host Alexei Pepers and Jesse Collet and Keni (former NetHack devs) will talk about the early days of NetHack and the role of open-source development in Roguelike games.

Reality TV shows are actually constructed realities with their own emergent narrative systems. In this talk, I'll share how my teammate Brian Bucklew (Caves of Qud) and I are working to translate the language volumes and behaviors of mid-2000s "celebreality" shows set in McMansions, into a generative story environment with Macintosh-inspired B&W graphics.

Are all reality shows actually roguelikes? Absolutely, and I'll also share some fun examples of how the world of PCG connects to the age of character-driven social media and performance, microcelebrity and the contemporary reality TV renaissance.

Every game is a fragment world– bordered by the rules of its logic. These boundaries may be spoken out loud (don’t step on the cracks! the floor is lava!) or may be programmed (the end of traversable ground, the rim of the map, an invisible wall that plays a bonk sound effect when you walk into it). Such edges, encircling, make the space of play. These worlds are defined by their boundaries– they exist floating. This talk takes as its center the concept of the walled garden, expanding it out to include games and games spaces. It looks at ornamental gardens, cloisters and isolate spaces, and even mythological or utopian fantasies of worlds apart, and seeks to connect the logic of potent isolation to the games we make and play. By examining historical narratives of boundaries, walls, and edges as applied to constructed spaces, this talk thinks about processes of worldbuilding and systems design as a methodology of gardening, with all of its attendant violences (against the slugs, yes, but also in their construction out of the world)– and looks as well beyond the boundary, where the garden stops and a wildness of bugs, errors, logical failures and edge cases begin.

A retrospective of the challenges and rewards of developing Alphaman, a post-apocalyptic Roguelike game for DOS back before Windows or widespread internet use. I will talk about the challenges of programming with Microsoft QuickBasic while gearing the code for computers with 8088 microprocessors, with the intent to distribute on 3 ½” disks. I will describe some of my motivation for the admittedly quirky aspects of Alphaman, and talk about some of the content and humor that did and didn’t stand up to the test of time after nearly 30 years. I will also include a plug for the GitHub site where Jamie Bainbridge put the source code (he is my hero for managing to successfully recompile Alphaman after nearly 30 years. This could provide a peek into the source code of a project that grew much larger than originally expected, requiring expanding the original clumsy QuickBasic code with QuickC modules, which themselves included embedded machine language code at places where computation speed needed to be increased. Kids these days have it so easy!

A Live Mixed Reality Full-Motion Video Performance

A walkthrough of how Spry Fox designs are implemented under the hood. We've developed a text-based config library that contains a number of procedural patterns so our small design team can multiply our content efforts and maintain our game systems. In our latest project, we've added a "design dashboard" layer which lets us peer into our own game data at a higher level. I'll talk through how it works, why we like it, and where we plan to take it next.

The creator of Backpack Hero will discuss balance and item creation!