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A comment on Steambirds: How handcrafted levels prevent game design iteration. Parent comment

Re:Steambirds: How handcrafted levels prevent game design it... by dkersten on Saturday December 04, 2010 @02:01AM (#1968757)
Sonic 3 & Knuckles was a beautifully crafted game (and one of the few popular platformers of the time where there were multiple routes through levels). Its still one of my favourite games to this day.

"consider the RPGs and survival horror games ..."

Speaking of survival horror games, the Left4Dead procedural editing of levels works quite well (though the general layout is handcrafted). I think a similar mechanism would work quite well for games where completely procedurally generated levels aren't desirable.

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Re:Steambirds: How handcrafted levels prevent game design it... by pbiggar on Saturday December 04, 2010 @10:16AM (#1969341)
One problem with Left 4 Dead is that you rapidly run out of levels (even though each level is very well designed).

I think random levels would work very well, especially for online gaming. If a team didn't know the level, it would really feel like exploring a dangerous zombie infested world.

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Re:Steambirds: How handcrafted levels prevent game design it... by dkersten on Saturday December 04, 2010 @04:20PM (#1970184)
Oh, I agree. I just meant that its a reasonable intermediate level of procedurally generated levels. I think for a future version they could ramp up how much is randomly generated instead of hand crafted.

I like the idea because you get a nice mixture between replayable random levels and nice and well designed human designed levels.

Theres definitely a lot of room for future improvement though and I'm excited to think about what we may have to play with in the future.

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