A card game that generates procedural generation ideas

[Kate Compton]

Hey all, 

I'm Kate Compton, I've been a PCG person for ~14 years, given lots of talks, built lots of generators, etc. 

As part of my work, I'm really interested in 

• how to understand procedural content generation systems
  
• how to explain my approach to building generative systems for art and games
  
• how to get students and new practitioners to understand designing PCG (beyond "random seed -> ??? -> game levels")
  

So I came up with a framework where data is transformed and recombined (like a dataflow language) from inputs to outputs.  And then I turned the framework into a deck of cards that you can play with.  You can use them to socket together your own generative/interactive pipelines, or to try to diagram out existing difficult-to-understand or underspecified generative systems (like this one)

You can learn more about the project here:  http://www.galaxykate.com/generominos/ & print a CC-licensed deck of your own to try out.  Feel free to ask me any questions about the project.  

Plus, I'm still rapidly iterating on the deck, and am looking for any feedback (the cards are generated by a JSON card-generator I made, so revisions and additions are trivial)  The goal is to eventually develop this deck into a teaching and brainstorming tool that will be useful for generative practitioners of all levels.

FYI for instructors: we recently tested these on undergrads with no PCG background (in an alternative controllers class), and the results were *very positive*.

-Regards

Kate