Keep Running Procedural Level Generation in Sure Footing

In this piece I'm being a little bit selfish and talking about a game that I made for a change and how AI and procedural generation can build scalable and flexible level generation systems. Sure Footing is an infinite running platforming game developed by my company Table Flip Games and takes the infinite running template seen in flash and mobile games and expands upon it. The resulting game carries a dynamic, scaling and reactive procedural generation system that not only changes the world as you play, but makes decisions to change its own internal decision making and tweaks parameters based on player performance. The goal of Sure Footing is to allow for players to find a play style and pace that suits them as they race through the generated worlds: not just with the variety of characters, costumes and power-ups but also the difficulty of the level generation system itself - allowing players to treat it as a mild-paced platformer all the way to an intense twitch runner. In this piece I'm going to talk about how it all started, the academic research that inspired it, the AI that controls the bad guys and most importantly the procedural generation engine that powers the entire game. The engine manages not just how segments of the world are created, but how we modulate the scale of generation over time, how difficulty is encoded and makes changes at runtime to try and keep players engaged as best as possible.