Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry
This work targets game developers and researchers by offering incremental guidelines to bridge the industry-academia divide in PCG tools.
The paper addresses the gap between academia and industry in procedural content generation (PCG) by proposing three design pillars—Respect Designer Control, Respect the Creative Process, and Respect Existing Work Processes—to improve mixed-initiative interfaces, aiming to enhance synergy and usability without specifying concrete numerical results.
While the games industry is moving towards procedural content generation (PCG) with tools available under popular platforms such as Unreal, Unity or Houdini, and video game titles like No Man's Sky and Horizon Zero Dawn taking advantage of PCG, the gap between academia and industry is as wide as it has ever been, in terms of communication and sharing methods. One of the authors, has worked on both sides of this gap and in an effort to shorten it and increase the synergy between the two sectors, has identified three design pillars for PCG using mixed-initiative interfaces. The three pillars are Respect Designer Control, Respect the Creative Process and Respect Existing Work Processes. Respecting designer control is about creating a tool that gives enough control to bring out the designer's vision. Respecting the creative process concerns itself with having a feedback loop that is short enough, that the creative process is not disturbed. Respecting existing work processes means that a PCG tool should plug in easily to existing asset pipelines. As academics and communicators, it is surprising that publications often do not describe ways for developers to use our work or lack considerations for how a piece of work might fit into existing content pipelines.