Manuel Kerssemakers, Jeppe Tuxen, Julian Togelius and Georgios Yannakakis have done something remarkable. They’ve created a computer program that does Nintendo’s job. Sort of.
For their paper called A procedural procedural level generator generator, blogged today by Gamasutra, they built a system that’s able to randomly generate levels for Infinite Mario Bros, the never-ending Mario tribute developed by Minecraft creator Marcus “Notch” Persson.
The way they’ve designed the program to build the levels is fascinating, creating limits on the number of certain items while encouraging enemies to spawn, I guess, sensibly.
Their efforts are underpinning a community who have taken their program and modified it to build their own levels. You can try it out yourself here.
A procedural procedural level generator generator [Paper, via Gamasutra]
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One response to “Humans Create Program That Builds Its Own Super Mario Bros Levels”
After playing through the first two castles, what I noticed is that they haven’t yet dealt with secret exits, which for me have always been the best thing about SMB. Obviously this wasn’t the focus of the Java game that was linked, which was about placing enemies and jumps (which were done pretty well, there were a few “oh fuck!” situations).