Probability Zero

You might have guessed, but I've gone on a bit of a procedural game downloading binge lately. The lastest is probability Zero, a prodcedurally generated falling game from a game design competion some time ago.

The idea is as simple as any; you start at the top, and climb down a procedurally generated maze of blocks and foes until you lose, then you get a highscore, rinse, and repeat.

But, at it's heart lies it's true form - procedural generation. One that reveals under closer speculation that it's not procedural at all, but merely random. Which is unfortunate, because the game is fairly fun if not for the few issues that plague it, revealing the crunchy random center that tries to pass itself off as Procedural.

You see, a procedural falling game would base what randomly appears next on what the character's curren abilities are. The enemies that shoot out from under things would wait until you've unlocked the horizontal attack, longer drops would generate more often when you buy the increased falling distance upgrade and so on. But it's not the case. The game doesn't (seem to) care whether you can fall X distance wthout taking damage before it adds it to the map. It doesn't care if it generates two equally likely looking paths, and then seals one off beyond your ability to jump out of the scrolling screen.

Okay, the last one is probably a bug that would crop up in a truly procedurally generated game of the same type, but only because the screen scrolls. Still, there are too many times you simply have to give up and wait to be crushed because the path you chose is one tile too high to jump out of, and has been revealed as sealed off on the bottom of the screen.

The one thing that would reveal the game as procedurally generated instead of random would be the existance of pre-planned jumps. Your character can always move within a certain parameter of speed and height, and while it might change as you improve it's not like it goes outside certain boundries. Pre-programmed jumps are blocks that are in an exact relative location to one another such that a player can jump between them using their expected abilities. Maybe it's one space up and two over, maybe it's three over and two down, these are jumps the player can make if they know how to jump, but they're not impossible, ever. Probability zero has no such set of jumps, it's not designed for the player to fel like they're playing a scrolling game aginst the clock, running an endless gauntlet until you mess up, instead it feels like you're playing against a computer hoping it doesn't generate a too high jump for you to make without getting stunned by the fall then shot off a cliff by a nearby enemy.

So, it's not really procedural, it just pretends to be. Sure, that's good enough for most people who don't know the difference, but maybe that's why it didn't win the contest.

The only other question to ask is, 'is it fun?' to which the answer is 'once you get the hang of it, absolutey'