Ah, procedural generation. The easiest way to add replay value to a game. Or is it?

Let’s talk about content and replay value, two vague but still useful measures of entertainment. (Note: Richard Stallman published a style guide telling everyone to stop calling artistic works “content.” This isn’t really important or relevant, I just find it amusing.)

The term “content” applies to most forms of online entertainment – games, movies, comics, art, and so on. The term “replay value” obviously only applies to games, because there really isn’t the same concept in other media. Sure, you can replay a video, and people do, but not as much and not for the same reasons.

Disclaimer: this post involves a lot of personal opinion and personal experience, moreso than usual.

Defining “content”

“Content” is a measure of something, but… what? (tl;dr at bottom)

Take YouTube videos. Those are widely agreed to be “content,” but does one video equal one content? No: a hundred 5-second videos aren’t a hundred times more content than a single long video. But it isn’t video length, either. A boring hour-long livestream can feel like less content than a few minutes’ worth of 5-second videos. It seems to be a combination of video count, length, level of detail, entertainment value, and (I would argue) release schedule. We’re more likely to refer to someone as a “content creator” if they release videos at semi-regular intervals.

In video games, all kinds of things count as content. Levels, characters, weapons, items, enemies, you name it. If players are excited to see more of a thing in the next update, they’ll probably call it “content.” (You may note the two media are slightly different – a YouTube video is a single indivisible piece of content, while a game is made up of many pieces of content. But I see that as an artifact of the medium. You can’t extend or modify YouTube videos after uploading, so we don’t talk about them in those terms.)

Games receive “content updates” from time to time, and one of the things players talk about is the size of these updates. The more changes made, the bigger the update. But “changes made” isn’t the metric being used. I’ve released content updates that took ages to make and still felt disappointingly small because players breezed through the levels in 15 minutes.

So… time spent? The more time you spend, the more content in a game? Well no. If that were true, idle games would have more content than any other game, followed by super-grindy RPGs. But we never talk about grinding as content; in fact, it’s almost antithetical. Idle games do have content, but the “content” comes in between grinding. When you unlock a new item or upgrade or whatever the game involves, there’s a period of adjustment, where you’re exploring the new possibilities. You have to figure out how to use this new thing effectively, and when you start to figure that out, you settle into your new grinding routine. Each new thing that makes you think is a piece of content.

So… is “making you think” the definition of content? Not quite, but it’s a lot closer.

tl;dr: I’d say the act of exploration – either literally exploring an area or figuratively exploring the possibilities of a game mechanic – is what defines content. The more time you spend exploring, the more content there is.

Defining “replay value”

Replay value is how many times you can replay a game (or part of a game) without feeling like you’re grinding. There are still some challenges to be had and discoveries to be made, even if you’ve already seen each location, item, and upgrade at least once.

At least, that’s the definition I’ll use here. Note that by this definition, replay value is a type of content. (In fact, I’m going to use the terms semi-interchangeably.) Either way, you’re exploring the game’s possibilities, and you aren’t grinding.

Defining “grinding”

Grinding is the act of replaying a game (or a section of a game) that you already thoroughly understand. It’s all about repetition and execution – you’re going to do this thing over and over again until you achieve some kind of goal.

When you fight weak enemies in an RPG to gain experience, that’s grinding. A particularly boring type of grinding, and hardly the only type. You can also grind an obstacle course, with the goal of eventually beating it. You can grind for resources by combing back and forth over the areas they most commonly appear. In rare cases, even a boss fight – supposedly the most exciting part of a game – can end up being a grind if the fight is slow or depends on randomness.

Speedrunning is (IMO) the most exciting form of grinding. Speedrunners will practice their maneuvers over and over to build muscle memory, and then spend even more time attempting full speedruns until everything comes together and they pull off all the tricks in a row. It’s a spectacular end result made possible only by replaying a game for hours, days, weeks, months, even years past the “replay value” stage. The speedrunner already found/did everything the developers intended them to find/do (content and replay value), and decided to press onwards (grinding).

To be fair, speedrunners also spend a fair amount of time experimenting, hunting for exploitable bugs and faster routes. This is a sort of exploration, not grinding, so it counts as content. It’s just content the developers didn’t intend to add.

Infinite Mode

Now that I’ve given my definitions, on to the two “infinite” modes. Both Run and Run 3 have a mode by this name, and though they’re different, I built them with the same goal: use randomness to add replay value.

Run 1’s Infinite Mode is simple. Each level is a random scattering of tiles. Not fully random – there’s a bias towards clumping together – but close enough. This produces a practically endless number of levels, but not an endless amount of content. Once you’re good enough to beat the highest difficulty, it takes only a few more run-throughs before you get used to everything the mode has to offer, and “replaying” becomes “grinding.” Ultimately, there isn’t a whole lot of content here.

In Run 3, the mode contains over 300 pre-made levels, which you encounter in a mostly-random order. This provides a much more varied experience, with each level having a distinct style and challenge. This is, unambiguously, a lot of content, and all it took was making 300+ levels by hand. Then there are a bunch of achievements that give bonus cash if you can beat levels in unusual ways, and upgrades to be purchased with this cash, and post-run statistics that provide tidbits of information on how you did. All this creates a much more replayable mode… in theory.

In practice, most of that stuff is for grinding, and therefore doesn’t count as “content” by my definition. The main culprit are the shop prices, some of which are astronomical. You’ll still be grinding for the Angel long past when you’ve seen most of the levels. This isn’t great design, and I know that, but in my defense, it’s supposed to be temporary.

Which brings us to the future of the two modes. In short, I want to add more content to both of them, building off what already exists. I want Run 1 to generate more interesting levels, and I want to make better use of Run 3’s existing 300+ levels.

The future of Infinite Mode in Run 1

For this mode, I want to start employing patterns. So many of my hand-made levels were made by creating a simple pattern, then repeating it. It shouldn’t be hard for a computer to do the same, even if it won’t do as good a job.

On top of that, adding an option to share random seeds will instantly increase add replay value. Not by adding new levels or anything; that’s what the patterns are for. No, seeds will make the existing levels more interesting to explore. Now you have more reason to pay attention to little details, because if you find an interesting randomly-generated level, you can save it for later and share it with friends.

For those out of the loop, computers rarely use truly-random numbers. Instead, they use complicated and unpredictable patterns to simulate true randomness. The mathematics are complicated, but all you really need to understand is they start with a seed: a single number serving as a starting point. And each time you start with the same seed, you’ll get the same “random” values in the same order. That would make Infinite Mode generate the same levels in the same order, down to the tile.

Well, kind of. Infinite Mode’s levels are based on two factors: randomness and difficulty. Difficulty is constantly changing based on the player’s performance, not based on the seed. You’d only get the same levels if the difficulty value happened to be the same. Fortunately, once you unlock a difficulty, you can go back and replay lower difficulties to see what you missed.

I think this will matter most to speedrunners. Now instead of each level being its own self-contained challenge, you’re playing a set of 100 connected levels, and you know them all in advance. You have to beat only about 10% of them, and the trick is to pick the easiest and fastest ones. So say you just beat difficulty 35 and jumped to 45, but you already know that 45 is annoying and inconvenient. You might choose to fall back to 44 and play that instead, even though that reduces your progress by 1 overall. That’s 100 levels’ worth of possibilities to explore, with almost no extra effort on my part.

tl;dr: I want to generate slightly better levels, and provide a way to replay ones you like. Both would add a modest amount of replay value.

The future of Infinite Mode in Run 3

I have multiple plans for this mode. I want to make the levels more interesting in and of themselves. I want to expand the upgrade system, including upgrades to income (so the Angel doesn’t take so ridiculously long). I want to arrange the levels in more interesting ways, with occasional choice points. I want more risk-reward tradeoffs.

I plan to make the levels more interesting by adding, removing, or moving tiles. The same sort of thing that Run 1 does, except less random. This doesn’t add much new content, as the levels will be mostly the same, but it’ll keep players from getting complacent.

Everything else – upgrades, choice points, tradeoffs – will be bona fide new content, and will take a lot of effort to design. Each will introduce new strategic choices, at different levels of gameplay. Tradeoffs happen in the moment, and you succeed or fail after a few seconds. At a choice point, you commit to a branch of the tunnel, and that branch determines the next several levels. It’s a higher-level decision with longer-lasting consequences. Upgrades happen before you even set out, and affect an entire run, creating some meta-level gameplay where you decide what to bring.

Each higher-level decision will affect the lower-level ones, creating more possibilities to explore. As an example, suppose one of the upgrades is a flashlight. If you bring that along, you might feel more comfortable venturing into a low-power branch of the tunnel, because you’d still be able to see a little. But then once you’re there you come across a long-jump challenge, and you decide not to attempt the jump because the flashlight doesn’t reach that far. Instead you go around and pass up that reward. If only you’d brought a mobility upgrade in place of the flashlight… but in that case would you have risked coming to the low-power branch?

tl;dr: There’s still a lot of potential to spice up Run 3’s Infinite Mode, and I plan to do it by adding game mechanics. Adding a few more levels won’t make much difference, but new mechanics will add replay value to all 300+ levels simultaneously.