A Survey of Procedural Content Generation Techniques Suitable to Game Development

Abstract

The development of a complex game is a time consuming task that requires a significant amount of content generation, including terrains, objects, characters, etc that requires a lot of effort from the a designing team. The quality of such content impacts the project costs and budget. One of the biggest challenges concerning the content is how to improve its details and at the same time lower the creation costs. In this context procedural content generation techniques can help to reduce the costs associated with content creation. This paper presents a survey of classical and modern techniques focused on procedural content generation suitable for game development. They can be used to produce terrains, coastlines, rivers, roads and cities. All techniques are classified as assisted (require human intervention/guidance in order to produce results) or non-assisted (require few or no human intervention/guidance to produce the desired results).