Procedural Generation

A grid of cells whose states evolve by a local rule applied simultaneously everywhere.

a genre of indirect settlement control where production chains and mood systems generate stories rather than just outcomes.

Repeatedly narrowing the possible values of each variable using the constraints, until nothing more can be deduced.

The property that identical inputs produce identical outputs, and the foundation of caching and verification.

Outcomes that arise from the interaction of systems the designer never scripted directly, as opposed to authored, scripted content.

Narrative carried by placed objects and world state rather than dialogue, completed by the audience's inference.

A genre whose core verb is building the machine that plays the game, turning the player into a systems engineer.

Selling randomized draws rather than items, and the structures that make the real price hard to see.

Computer opponents built to be interesting to play against rather than optimal.

A design tradition that simulates consistent rules rather than scripting outcomes, so solutions the designer never planned still work.

A rewriting grammar that generates branching structures by repeated substitution.

Swapping an object's representation for a cheaper one as it becomes less visually significant, usually with distance.

Friction between what a game's mechanics reward and what its story claims to value.

Converts a scalar field sampled on a 3D grid into a triangle mesh by classifying each cube's corners.

A process whose next state depends only on the present state, and the basis of pre-neural text generation.

Persistent advancement that survives a failed run, converting loss into currency and a hard genre into a habit.

A handcrafted world structured as a lock-and-key graph, where new abilities reopen old space rather than extending it.

Story content generated algorithmically from rules and state at runtime, trading hand-crafted specificity for combinatorial scale.

Converting geometry into pixels — the dominant real-time rendering approach.

a genre that judges player input against a musical beat, where calibration is a fairness problem, not a preference.

A genre defined by procedurally generated runs and permanent death, and the design pressures those create.

a hybrid genre where a deck built entirely within one run replaces the dungeon as the object of play.

Distinguishes itself from Roguelike by keeping meta-progression between runs, so failure still advances the player even through permadeath.

Pseudorandom generation from an explicit seed, so any output is reproducible.

A small program run on the graphics processor for every vertex or every pixel.

A function giving the distance to the nearest surface, signed so inside and outside are distinguishable.

The racing genre spectrum running from arcade handling to full physical simulation, and the hardware built to serve the far end of it.

A card-game family in which players contest a series of small rounds, and a source of unusually clean rule systems.

A volumetric pixel — a value on a regular three-dimensional grid.