Grammar Directed Procedural Content Generation (PCG)

Overview

Words bring forth new worlds,
A thousand, thousand new lives,
With words all are shaped

Grammar-directed procedural content generation is a system that uses evolutionary practices and procedural content generation to create different gameplay scenarios. Popular games, such as The Binding of Issac and Spelunky may use this PCG system to randomly generate levels, item placement and enemies. In theory, this allows game designers to produce an infinite amount of levels and scenarios. This means players can master the mechanics of these games but will still have a challenging but rewarding experience due to the new levels and enemy placements each play through.

How does grammar-directed procedural content generation work?

Grammar-directed procedural content generation works by having certain specific rules or commands that rewrite the code turning it into a combination of different code. Grammar-directed procedural content generation can be as simple or have a complexion as one wants, all it takes is a system replacing a sequence or string to be different from the one previously generated. Gearbox, the developers of Borderlands, use a system that procedurally generates a combination of weapons using different, stats, features and makes. This system creates millions of unique weapons for the players to go and loot.

References

[1] Moghadam, Arman Balali, and Marjan Kuchaki Rafsanjani. "A genetic approach in procedural content generation for platformer games level creation." Swarm Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation (CSIEC), 2017 2nd Conference on. IEEE, 2017.
[2] Hall, Jason Andrew, Benjamin Williams, and Christopher J. Headleand. "Artificial Folklore for Simulated Religions." Cyberworlds (CW), 2017 International Conference on. IEEE, 2017.