Is Procedural Generation Worth It?

Should you use procedural generation for your game world?
Or are hand made worlds always better? What do you think?

No Man Sky, Minecraft, Terraria or Starfield make heavy use of procedurally generated content. Are they worse games because of that?

Article:

Learn more about Procedural Generation in Enter The Gungeon:

About me:
Hey,
I am Vojta Nevrela and I make games.

I want to spend my time on earth pursuing the quest of becoming an amazing game developer (Good to note, that I am clearly on the beginning of this journey... 5 years in... -_- )
I want to share with you everything I learn, so you too can make cool games for me to play. ;)

That's why I am posting on YouTube and share Open Source projects. It's also a reason why I am working at GameReady as an Education Coordinator to help nurture the next generation of Game Developers.

For more and tutorial commissions:

[lordhuzix]

This article is rather uninsightful. It manages to describe a lot without conveying anything. I would agree with your point of view, you really need both to ensure that the game looks the desired way and that you can develop it in a reasonable time period.

Handmade will always look better assuming you know what you are doing but it will most likely take a lot longer to be finished depending on the scale. Things that are brought to player focus by your game design decisions will be valued more since the player interacts with them more. That's where you start to introduce handmade stuff. Where you draw the line of what is worth being handmade and what is not is up to you.

[beskamir]

Nothing quite like procrastinating on youtube cause I'm feeling stuck trying to do procedural generation only to see a video asking if procedural generation is worth it in my subscription list.

Edit: Yeah that's a pretty stupid article. Both approaches have their place in game dev. Personally I prefer procedural workflows cause I find it a lot more interesting/fun to figure out how to generate as much as I can procedural instead of authoring everything directly. Even if it'd take me longer or leads to worse results, I'd still prefer the satisfaction of having come up with a generator over manually creating everything directly. Of course, there are situations where even I'd prefer a handcrafted approach to trying to come up with a procedural solution, but it really depends on the type of game you're making.