Procedural natural systems for game level design

Due to the increase in magnitude and level of detail of next-gen games, the time required to manually design a game level has increased dramatically. This paper introduces procedural natural systems, a novel approach aimed at reducing the time needed to design large-scale natural phenomena for game levels. The concept of natural systems separates the shape of a natural phenomenon from its footprint, allowing a designer to edit either of them separately. Various procedural techniques are used to combine the shape and footprint of a natural system, as well as to tweak these in real-time in a game world. We conclude that natural systems provide a solid foundation for intuitive, flexible and efficient procedural generation of significant portions of a game level.

@InProceedings { HDBB10a,
  author       = "Huijser, Remco and Dobbe, Jeroen and Bronsvoort, Willem F. and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Procedural natural systems for game level design",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of SBGames 2010",
  pages        = "177--186",
  month        = "nov",
  year         = "2010",
  address      = "Florianopolis, SC, Brazil",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2010/HDBB10a"
}