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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Spelunky rearranging level pieces which were designed by a human? I imagine if you played it long enough, you'd start to recognize the pieces.

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A lot of roguelikes (e.g. Dcss) do this as well. I'd be interested to see a game with truly random procedurally generated levels, though the levels may end up being repetitive and mundane.

I don’t believe that’s true. DCSS is mostly true procedural generation from a seed against constraints. There however some special fixed layouts for final floors, and small predefined vault rooms.

I've played an absolute fuckton of DCSS and it is true. There are small "blocks" that you'll see over and over that are exactly the same. The best example I can give is the room Crazy Yiuf hangs out in with the tree hallway leading to it.

That is a vault

Edit: not to be confused with the Vaults floor*

Vaults are custom handcrafted rooms.

Yes, you do. Each piece has randomness within the piece too, so even then it's not all the same.

Being able to learn how the level generation works as a player is part of the experience of playing a roguelike game, so I don't think that's a bad thing though! Games with too much randomness and not enough structure can feel a bit samey

Absolutely, but I can imagine an AI like ChatGPT, which is able to write stories that at least feel "creative"—might be able to generate levels that feel hand-crafted but are in fact entirely original.

While it does arrange prebuilt blocks it also does more, it will punch holes in the walls as needed and does procedural population of what's in each block. The second one takes things further.

Effectively, yes. Although a lot of additional things are also randomized like item/enemy spawns.

Then for Spelunky 2 there's the randomizer mod which randomizes almost everything. It pretty much never ceases to surprise you. Look up spelunky 2 randomizer on Youtube to see for yourself.

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