Introduction to Christopher Tye

Intro

Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Tye and I’m a computer science major with a minor in gaming. Don’t let the name fool you, my minor doesn’t involve playing games at all, but instead focuses on design elements and many traditional fine arts focused ideas. I’m now in my 9th semester at the University of New Mexico and taking the final classes of my undergraduate and shared credit program.

Throughout my life, I often haven’t stimulated my creative learning, but have placed a greater focus on it as my degree has progressed and become even more math and theory based. My brain needs a break sometimes of course! I took this class because it presented an amazing opportunity to gain credits towards my masters while still developing my skills in design within my game development hobby. I’m looking most forward to combining my skills as a logical developer with my growing interest in the arts throughout this semester!

Computational Design Inspiration: Procedural Content in Video Games

As the video game industry has exponentially grown within the past few decades, so too has the demand for more and more content in those games. With such an intensive development cycle and tight budgets, it became apparent in time that manually designing every nook and cranny of these massive worlds would become immensely difficult, if not impossible. In response, developers in recent years have turned to procedural content generation as a tool to increase quality and quantity in one stroke. Procedural generation reaches into all aspects of development, from art to writing to world building, and though its still in its infancy, we’ve already seen how this practice can result in massive profits.

No example is more far spread or more recognizable than the most played game in the world, Minecraft. We’ll focus in on how the game generates and designs its world procedurally, and how computational design sprung a solo indie developer named Markus Persson into a realm otherwise untouchable by most.

Unlike many video games, Minecraft didn’t have its developers design the game world by hand. There are almost no elements within the game that the developers designed specifically into the world. Instead, Markus decided to design an algorithm that “designs” the players world for them. Thanks to this, there are millions, perhaps billions of possible worlds that aren’t exactly like one another, making every players experience a new one. There are a multitude of methods used in order to make this generation feel good to the player, but the main one is called Perlin noise. Given a map of sorts, the algorithm takes the pseudo random values contained within to determine characteristics off the game world, such as height, biome or special structures.

I find this so compelling because we have seen through recent AI developments that large models can create compelling language bots that talk much like a normal human. So what then is stopping the building of a world design generative AI for a particular video game? This could accelerate turn around times and increase quality in other facets of such a comprehensive field as game development, if for nothing else than for first draft purposes. We’ve seen this already with Markus Persson, who on his own “built” infinite worlds that have resonated with millions of people around the globe, and resulted in millions of dollars for himself no doubt. The Minecraft video game is no longer controlled by Markus, but the foundation he laid down has been used and refined by the games new developers and other developers around the world.

With such a huge and spanning project, old development blogs have been lost to time or are difficult to find. Linked here is a blog describing more about Markus’ journey in developing Minecraft for those interested. I’m excited to get into this school semester with all of you and see all the wonderful projects we design. Nice to meet you!