EPC2018 | Wave Function Collapse in Bad North | Oskar Stalberg

The creator Oskar Stålberg has a great overview talk of Wave Function Collapse and how he applied it to his previous game Bad North - it’s absolutely worth a watch! ▶ this video

Oskar Stålberg has some great talks on YouTube about how the systems in Bad North and Townscaper work. ▶ this video link link link

Oskar Stålberg has famously used WFC in Bad North and Townscaper. Here's a nice presentation from him explaining it: ▶ this video

And here's another, slightly more technical talk from him about the "wave function collapse" algorithm he uses for procedural generation in his games: ▶ this video

Please note that this is an old demo that has since grown into a full-blown game: link (Says Windows-only, but has a working Beta for Mac) Here's a talk by Oskar on how generating such worlds work: ▶ this video

As far as I know they are using a customised variant of the "wave-function collapse" technique, used and popularised by Oskar Stalberg in his games "Bad North" and "Townscaper". The technique boils down to hand-crafting tons of tiles with adjacency rules about which tiles can slot together. When the user adds/removes a tile the algorithm iteratively tries to find fitting tiles and, if needed, changes neighbouring tiles for ones with the best transitions. He gave a talk where he goes into detail about this[1]. You can also find more if you google his name and "wave-function collapse". [1]: ▶ this video

Yes, it is probably its main usage The author of the GitHub repo is a pretty successful game author and has used it many times for his games Here’s a talk by him talking about procedural generation using wave function collapse: ▶ this video

I played around a lot with this library: link Fun stuff, but I struggled to get a lot of value out of using it for level gen. You get cool patterns, but levels need structure and intent to be interesting. Adding constraints to the algorithm becomes a big-oh nightmare and you end up with frequently unsolvable paths as the algorithm recurses. The game Bad North used it to good effect, so depending on the game it may be a very useful tool in the toolbelt. ▶ this video

Its creator has a bunch of details on their Twitter ( link , although digging through long Twitter history is of course a pain) and given some talks: ▶ this video link

Not sure what of this was actually used in townscaper, but someone in another discussion of the game (can't remember where unfortunately) referred to these two sources: - Oskar Stålberg's 2018 Talk "Wave Function Collapse in Bad North" ( ▶ this video ) - Müller et al, 2006 - "Procedural Modeling of Buildings" ( link )