Procedural generation of content has a long history. It basically means that parts of an application or a game are not hardcoded by a developer but are created by an algorithm on the fly. Minecraft and No Man’s Sky are two recent examples of what is possible today – giant worlds full of different textures, mountains, caves and objects are generated by AI (Artificial Intelligence) make the games an almost infinite place to discover. The game presented here is slightly simpler but uses 100% procedural generation as a base for the gameplay. “Who Dies?” is a 2D platformer with a simple goal: You’ll see a randomly generated world full of tiles, springs, spins, monsters and rocks and must guess which monster will get hit by a rock once gravity is turned on. For every right guess, you’ll get points and level upgrades.
The game uses Markov Chains to concatenate tiles and other objects in a logical order, complexity of levels is set by the number of objects and size of tiles. Like every procedurally generated game, the algorithm does not always generate “beautiful” or logical levels like human beings would do. But in the end, this method makes sure that there are an infinite number of playable levels in the game.