Darius Kazemi writes about procedural generation, ActivityPub, and small web tools and projects.
HN links it for his Spelunky level generation write-up and his guide to learning ActivityPub, which commenters cite as a useful reference.
Another cheap and very effective technique for procedural level and maze generation is to create a "walker" or series of walkers that start at some point, walk in a direction and then turn at random intervals, leaving a path of corridors and occasionally rooms in their wake. This is how Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne generates its levels, and there's a good article from Jan Willem Nijman, it's developer, here: http://www.vlambeer.com/2013/04/02/random-level-generation-in-wasteland-kings/
If you'd like a more academic look into procedural 2d game generation, there's a nice research paper here, that describes a method and talks about Spelunky a lot (the king of procedural 2d level generation, in my book): http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/cig10_043CP2_115.pdf
Additionally, Derek Yu open sourced the code to the original Spelunky, and Darius Kazemi created a great breakdown of its level generation techniques here, also with interactive examples: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/index.html
The action roguelike genre, particularly the roguelike FPS, is a vital new area being explored by indie game developers. It reminds me of the way 2D platformers were mined, explored, and iterated upon starting around 7 or 8 years ago.
Right now, it doesn't take much to stand out from the herd, as many of the most popular games in the genre don't do much beyond generating a bunch of square rooms and connecting them with doors and short, straight corridors. In my opinion,…
I've started working on a custom ActivityPub implementation because I am interested by it, but I have to say my impressions so far is that it is more complicated to implement than I originally expected. I find the docs lacking, the test suite hasn't worked in a long time, either. Someone even made a document explaining how to read the relevant specs[0]
Right now Mastodon seems to be the biggest player, but curious what the second/third biggest would be? Pleroma? Having Tumblr add compatibility seems like it could be huge.
[0]: https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/
I wonder if there's some threshold to be crossed where it can be surprising for longer. I made a video game name generator long ago that just picks a word (or short phrase) from each of three columns. (The majority of the words / phrases are from me, though many other people have contributed.)
I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe the Spelunky-type approach can be surprising for longer; that is, make a bunch of hand-curated bits and pick from them randomly: https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
Douglas Crockford, in Atari days, remarked on some procedurally generated content:
"Never once the same. Never twice very much different."
The Diablo 2 / 3 franchises do procedural dungeon generation, as does Spelunky. They have written rather thoughtful articles on some of their techniques.
http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
(Hmmm, can't find anything concrete about Diablo. I'll keep looking).
Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read. As far as procedural level generation goes, one of my favourite articles on the topic is this one about Spelunky's level generation: http://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/. It's always impressive to see how combining a few simple rules can yield complex and varied levels.
I reference a few in my orientation thread https://hachyderm.io/@PeterBronez/109521578914692484
For learning ActivityPub specifically, the best meta-guide I’ve found is https://tinysubversions.com/notes/reading-activitypub/