This talk is an attempt to challenge the ways in which roguelikes handle death, reincarnation, and the way in which the player's failures "haunt" the game's environments. We'll be looking at this through the lens of "hauntology", a cultural theory that deals in cycles of nostalgia and the ghosts that it creates, and looking at how this might apply to roguelites such as Inscryption and Returnal. I promise it won't be quite as morbid as it sounds.

Discover how randomness, particularly through oracles and partial successes, can transform game narratives from predictable paths into dynamic, unique stories. This talk will explore how random elements can drive compelling plotlines without relying on predefined lore, and how diverse complications can turn failures into opportunities for narrative branching. Through practical examples and case studies, we'll explore how structured randomness can lead to emergent storytelling that surprises both players and creators alike.

Neutrinowatch is a podcast where every episode changes every day. Python code in the background overwrites the audio based on procedural generation and real world events and conditions to create a new version of each episode. Examples include: - An astronomy show which uses the current positions of the stars visible from a different location - A song where the lyrics and instruments change - An episode where two “robots” talk about real-world news headlines - A “Dear John” letter that gets rewritten every day - Monologues that fade in and out of focus - Daily pieces of oblique advice for the creatively stuck 
Every episode is alive, a new version appearing each day - which presents unique challenges and opportunities for making audio. In our talk, we’ll dive into a couple of episodes, sharing the techniques and lessons we’ve learned as we created the show - and the roles audio effects, ambience, music, and text-to-speech models have in the sound design. How can we make an episode that’s interesting to listen to once? Twice? Ten times? How often have we succeeded in making something replayable? Join us, and help us to answer these questions, and more…

Creating dynamic, interactive narratives is hard, in no small part because of the massive amount of authoring effort they can require. I explore both where this authoring burden comes from and look at an approach to narrative design which avoids the exponential explosion of writing: braided narratives. Rather than every storyline or quest being its own fractal tree, we can wrap linear plots around each other to achieve dynamism through pacing instead of choice. Join me in this twisty adventure!

a lightweight, flexible way to generate landscapes for games and other projects.

A technical overview of Crypt of the NecroDancer's unique approach to online multiplayer, based on the principles of rollback, while replacing the conventional frame-based timeline by a turn-based system. Bringing online multiplayer to a rhythm game in which players can directly interact with the world and each other poses many challenges that aren't typically encountered while working on other network games - all while preserving the emergent, quirky mechanics that the game's community grew to love. This talk introduces a conventional rollback approach, then gradually shapes it into the architecture found in NecroDancer today, describing and resolving edge cases along the way. Follow the journey of how online multiplayer, a feature once dismissed as "impossible", was implemented!

An overview of Chunsoft's long-lived Mystery Dungeon series, including Torneko, Shiren, Chocobo, Pokemon and others

Join Art Director Marlowe Dobbe for a deep dive into techniques she has used to generate visual concepts for enemies for roguelike games. Visual variety is an important consideration when working on games that are highly replayable, and these techniques can streamline the brainstorming process to help you to create a lot of unique and distinct enemy designs without letting the well run dry. Learn how to collect reference, generate ideas, and design an enemy alongside Marlowe during the presentation!

In the early years of computing, a small turn-based game called Chase, built in the BASIC programming language, had players escaping robots and luring them into obstacles. It soon developed variations and enhancements as it spread to other computer systems. On the 60th anniversary of BASIC, we will examine these "robotlike" games and how the gameplay might be used in modern roguelikes.

In 2015 Lilith games contests a complaint for copyright infringement sent to them by Valve. The dispute is over Defense of the Ancients (DotA) the multi million dollar E-sports and casual play intellectual property. This contesting escalates into a multi year lawsuit in which Lilith games challenges Valve and Blizzards claim to DotA, trying to claim it as a ’collective work’, pressuring these mega companies to frantically try and establish a ’'legitimate'' claim to their intellectual property. And in the process transforming the games formerly thousands of authors into four. All this of course being in opposition to DotA’s nature – as a collective work. Lets dive into how Valve successfully transformed the narrative of DotA’s development to the detriment of 99% of it’s authors and community and how we can prepare ourselves for ownership heists like these. I suggest starting by looking to the practices of many a roguelike developer.

Learn how to use ProcGen techniques in a commercial game context, where how long it takes to write your generator, and how easy it is for non-technical persons on the team to integrate content into it, matters as much as the quality of the output. Alexander will give you advice on how to structure your generation so it is easy to expand, and how to create a good test workflow so the whole team can test their content. He will also show how iterating on the level generation led to use signed distance fields for island generation to fit with the requirements for the gameplay. The talk will end with a showcase of the custom tools and workflows he has created for his team to put art and story content into the game's generation.

Gameplay architecture is vital to the success of a roguelike, but it doesn't get the attention it deserves. In this session, we'll cover the "Black Box" approach to running game simulations independently from input, UI, graphics, animation, VFX, and sound. We'll start with an overview of the benefits of rigorously separating your game logic from input and presentation. Then, we’ll dive deep into a specific implementation that has been successfully used in multiple games, both launched and in the works. We'll break down how it's been used to implement replay systems, undo systems, damage preview, save/load, and networking. By the end, you’ll see just how powerful this approach can be for your own games.

Orb Pondering Simulator LIVE! is an audiovisual meditation opportunity and/or game about boredom played by a live online audience. Breathe in sync with a glowing, pulsating orb for increasingly extended periods of time! Interact with the synesthetic music system using chat commands! Gamify enlightenment!

This talk is on Tree-based Reconstructive Partitioning (TRP), a level generation approach which can generate a suite of diverse, structurally sound levels based on a single example level. On a high level, TRP leverages a general game playing agent (Monte Carlo Tree Search) to create a representation of a level in terms of playable and unplayable areas, then recombines playable and unplayable areas from the input level to make new ones. TRP outperforms popular approaches like WaveFunctionCollapse in terms of plagiarism and playability. In this talk, I’ll showcase the TRP approach. I’ll delve into how the algorithm itself works, show several examples across multiple game domains, and provide comparisons against several other popular low-data level generation approaches. The talk will end with a description of how to implement TRP via an example Godot implementation, along with exploring the challenges and issues with the algorithm and the future work that aims to address these concerns. I’m particularly excited about this approach because of both the coherency of the output levels in comparison to other low data level generation approaches and the overall elegance of the algorithm. I hope to see you there!

The 80-20 rule means different things to different people, so let's talk about all of them! (not really) What we are going to chat about is how the "80/20 rule" applies to production time, design familiarity, and player expectations in procedural generation. Real takeaways in include: "how polished is polished enough" for generative systems, "how granular should this system be", and "how much does the player think is actually generating versus static", "what does the community share in its experience" and what games have excelled at these properties in gaming.

What makes mathematics interesting? What makes mathematicians obsessed over things like prime numbers or Fibonacci sequences? It turns out, a lot of times, that it is the same properties that make procedural generation fun: a balance of chaos and order, complex behaviors from simple rules, and unexpected emergent behavior. Allow me to present a gallery of my favorite mathematical visualizations, from classic mainstays like Ulam spirals to my own work on colorful Fibonacci quilts, and analyze them to get to the heart what truly makes procedurality amazing.