Ever wondered what it is like to program computer games?

Or even better, what it is like to program programs that program your computer games for you? Then welcome to the wonderful world of procedural game design, such as Spore, Borderlands, and No Man’s Sky.

Recently, I have been watching and greatly enjoying this Youtube playlist of the South-African Sebastian Lague. In a series of nine videos, Sebastian programs a procedural cave generator from scratch. The program generates a pseudo-random cave, following some sensible constraints, everytime its triggered.

The following is Sebastian’s first video in the series labeled: Learn how to create procedurally generated caverns/dungeons for your games using cellular automata and marching squares.

It looks like Sebastian has many more interesting playlists on game development, so I’ll be reporting on any more pearls I find.

More in line with my blog’s main topics, Sebastian also hosts a series on neural networks, which I will most probably watch and report on over the course of the coming weeks:

Happy viewing!