The Usage of PCG Techniques Within Different Game Genres

Abstract: Procedural Content Generation (PCG) has become more common in usage in game development nowadays, with the motivation of finding new ways to make games replayable, new ways for games to be played or for generating content during development. This paper explores the question how often Procedural Generation is used in practice and furthermore how often it is used by different game genres and how they use PCG in their particular games. This paper will try to answer these questions through both an industry review, discovering which games have used Procedural Generation and also through a literature study to find out what kind of research has been done within the area ofPCG and how Game Developers could utilize that in the future. The findings were that even if the usage of PCG differentiated between genres, certain areas like Level Generationand entity instancating were more commonly using Procedural Generation compared with others such as Puzzle generation, Plot generation and Dynamic Systems. The literature study gave a perspective that there are plenty of research done within PCG on how to create new, different and unique ways to generate content, but it is usually in forms of prototypes and not ready to be used in games yet.This gives the conclusion that game genres use Procedural Generation to maximize the user experience with what the game wants out from that genre or use it to make game development more efficient. However, certain genres such as Adventure-games and Role-playing-games could benefit from having PCG for parts of the games where it is not used today which means there is still room for potentially using Procedural Generation. But with that also comes a discussion about what areas of PCG can be improved to meet the needs of the developers and make them more willing to use PCG on areas where it is not currently used.