Mastodawn

I've written a book! Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves is the story of procedural generation - the tech behind games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. It's about how it works, the games that use it, and the art and magic behind it.

Out May 7th, in bookshops: https://linktr.ee/next_level 🎲🔮

Show thread

Edward Loveall 2d ago

@mtrc Wow, this looks right up my alley. The description mentions AI, but does that mean 2026 “AI” like genAI/LLMs/agents, or “AI” like the game programmed to play against you?

Show thread

Mike Cook 2d ago

@edward Haha a fantastic question! In a sense, neither? It's AI because I consider this research to all be inside the umbrella field of AI, since it involves a lot of search, optimisation, constraint solving etc. So closer to the latter example you give. However there is a chapter on machine learning that touches on generative AI and the gap (in my opinion) between it and procedural techniques. But it's not a book about LLMs.

Show thread

Edward Loveall 2d ago

@mtrc Ah thank you. Yeah, it’s a difficult question to ask because AI is so many things today. I’m trying to avoid generative AI stuff, especially from openai, anthropic, et al, but it’s hard to separate that out from anything that might be called “AI”. Sounds like you’re not really using that stuff, so great! Looking forward to the book and thanks for the response.

Show thread

Mike Cook

@edward Of course, my pleasure! Yes, as an AI researcher from pre-2015 describing my job and the area is tricky, and leads to a lot of name clashes, but I'm very firmly in the "old-fashioned" camp of traditional AI and applying it to do weird things. Thanks for asking! :)