This was a lot of fun to read, really enjoyed the journey from game design to product design to ML. One thing I was hoping to ask was how come you felt the need to procedurally generate levels? I've often heard debates around whether content needs to be "hand-crafted" to be worth another human's time but curious to hear your take on this since it seems like you implemented both ends of the spectrum with endless and classic.
Also do you feel like you now have a general set of principles to procedurally generate levels that apply to games outside of echo chess? Puzzle games are great since they're well scoped for indie devs and I'd imagine a lot of would be puzzle designers would burn out before they create a few dozen-hundred levels.
> how come you felt the need to procedurally generate levels?
Three reasons:
(1) demand for new levels was too high - game traction exceeded my laziness threshold as a designer;
(2) puzzle lovers suffered from lack of replayability - game was effectively punishing core users who engage with it the most;
(3) designing a 'good' difficulty curve required me to quantify a level's difficulty objectively - anytime I design a puzzle or strategy game, I also try to design an algorithm that can solve it to get a general sense of how the different levels compare in difficulty;
(4) I tend to get obsessively curious about stuff - wasn't sure if it's feasible to have a 100% real-time procedural gen of chess mazes so I decided to do it to find out.
> I've often heard debates around whether content needs to be "hand-crafted" to be worth another human's time
LLM jokes aside, I think this is a great point and I'm not sure exactly what the right answer is here. I ended up keeping both Classic and Endless modes for this exact reason. If there's enough interest, I'll add a manual level generator for the community of 'humans' to submit their own hand-crafted creations for others to play.
> a general set of principles to procedurally generate levels that apply to games outside of echo chess?
Good question. I think it really comes down to this:
(a) can you formalize the concept of a 'level' and its components for your game in a way as to encode/decode every game state (at a minimum) easily and efficiently?
(b) can you parametrize this formalism in a way as to connect malleable randomizations to every meaningful component of a level to generate (hypothetical) infinite variability?
(c) do you have a confident way to make sure whatever generation of a 'level' you're churning out is as playable, achievable, and as fun as the manually crafted one? The fun part is the hardest one to automate. That's where I think you need a very strong grasp of what actually make your puzzle game fun. All the rest can likely be generalizable to other games.
> puzzle designers would burn out before they create a few dozen-hundred levels
Also do you feel like you now have a general set of principles to procedurally generate levels that apply to games outside of echo chess? Puzzle games are great since they're well scoped for indie devs and I'd imagine a lot of would be puzzle designers would burn out before they create a few dozen-hundred levels.