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Love - A Proceduraly Generated 1 Man Made MMO (rockpapershotgun.com)
13 points by Readmore on Feb 28, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



Recent games with large amounts of procedurally generated content (like GTA: San Andreas and Just Cause) generally have actual established locations where important action takes place (missions and so forth), and that's pretty much all you remember from the game. Those are the parts where the human effort goes into and you notice it. The procedurally generated stuff feels like the game equivalent of flyover country. Just Cause is so big that you literally fly over it and don't notice it.

Of course, in sandbox games where you have weapons, running around blowing random stuff up is fun for quite a while.

I hope this guy's game feels like a game (a product) rather than a tech demo.


Obvious fix: procedurally generated plotlines to match the procedurally generated terrain. Bit hard (generate races with mutations and factions and famous individuals of those factions and historical events involving those individuals and factions, then breed some family lines and run the economics to force feudalism, industrialism, capitalism and so on to spread across the world as it's explored and make some stereotypes of how each part of the world sees each other part, then create some famous bits of media using a combination of the Hero's Journey framework or some soap opera cliches and said stereotypes &c &c &ccc) but only on the level that, say, Spore is hard. Once it's done it could probably be used with just minor tweaks in thousands of games, though; perhaps even changing the writing profession to be a sort of make-up artist for such story skeletons.


Yep, Godel's incompleteness theorem all over again.


Interesting how he wants to grow the player base organically rather than seek a publisher. Something tells me that in the end he will go for the latter.




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