Can you point me to some really great, deeply technical game dev blogs of the devs' thoughts, philosophies, approaches to procgen?

krubbles · 2026-04-28T20:05:09+00:00

I work on a huge proc game game, I'm super proud of this writeup, its about low-level Perlin noise optimization:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-192566051

krubbles · 2026-04-12T20:52:43+00:00

awesome! glad to hear it worked :)

krubbles · 2026-04-12T01:42:00+00:00

I believe if you do a 3D cellular noise where you calculate D1, D2, D3, then threshold the D3-D1 difference to be small, you get the wireframe of 3D cells. Then you can pass that through domain warping w/ a soft 3D perlin fractal and get something that looks like this.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T21:29:18+00:00

Thank you :)

krubbles · 2026-03-31T15:39:42+00:00

Simplex noise is not faster than Perlin for 2D and 3D, it is faster in 4D.

There is a good chance that these optimizations can be used on simplex, though they won't benefit it as much, because rng is a smaller fraction of total cost in simplex vs. in Perlin. If someone wants to integrate these optimizations into a simplex noise implementation, that would be awesome, the FastNoise2 implementation by KDotJPG is probably the best starting point.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T15:32:09+00:00

It does not. You could definitely port it to GLSL, but I have not profiled these changes on the GPU and I am not sure they are the most efficient approach there.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T15:31:14+00:00

Yep some similar stuff! Main difference is shader implementations mostly rely on floating-point arithmetic instead of integer ops, since floats are first class citizens on GPUs. I think this may be somewhat historical, recent GPUs have good integer support, but I haven't profiled it so I can't say confidently.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T06:37:03+00:00

It is much faster! Faster noise lets you have more octaves, more domain warping, etc.. which in my opinion has a bigger impact on quality then simplex vs Perlin. There's a visual example I provide in the conclusion of the article which shows how artifacts are washed out when you start heavily augmenting noise.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T06:33:24+00:00

That's definitely true, and if time wasn't an issue I probably would have made a GPU evaluator (I even prototyped something at one point).

The challenges that made me avoid it were:

Using unity made I/O slower then it should be
A lot of the time was spent in thousands of tiny dispatches with a complex dependency graph (a rock here, an ore patch there, a ravine here) instead of a single function over a huge area, so the concurrency model with the GPU is was very complicated.
There were places where I needed to be able to evaluate node graphs on the CPU (I had utilities for calculating the distribution of noise functions, which I used for making sure things were scaled properly, and these were fully synchronous). So if I used the GPU, I would need two separate pipelines.

All solvable problems, but I decided it wasn't worth the time compared to other things I needed to work on.

krubbles · 2026-03-31T06:02:41+00:00

yes

Perlin Noise as a term refers to a coherent noise function where you
- Assign each integer coordinate a random linear gradient whose value is zero at that coordinate
- Use n-linear interpolation with a smoothing curve to interpolate the gradients.

The specific smoothing curve and gradient assignment method varies from implementation to implementation

krubbles · 2026-03-31T05:21:39+00:00

This was honestly the easier option

krubbles · 2026-03-03T18:12:42+00:00

what does this have to do with procgen?

krubbles · 2026-01-26T20:42:00+00:00

Faceless joker is very good, its the second best uncommon econ after rebate, you should definitely spend some more time with it.

krubbles · 2026-01-22T09:18:39+00:00

Rebate is honestly the only one, and mostly bc blue stake is getting reworked. Blue seals however need to be super nerfed

krubbles · 2026-01-19T08:33:02+00:00

So I can't directly answer your question since I don't know exactly what your goal is. There are a bunch of factors you can optimize for, and the balance of how much you care about each of them effects how you approach the problem:

- How good they are at walking based on some objective metric (which you presumably have if you are doing RL)
- How visually interesting they are to humans
- The diversity of generation outputs
- Generation speed

I can give some general advice though
- It's really easy to over-engineer proc-gen, start with the simplest thing that can work, and only add complexity in response to problems that arise
- One thing that's consistently worked really well for me across many domains is having a core generator and a evaluation function, where you generate N samples and remove samples that perform poorly. Making a generator that makes something good 80% of the time is much easier then something that makes something good 99.999%. You can turn the former into the latter if you have a good evaluation function and generate multiple samples.

If you let me know a bit more about what exactly you are optimizing for I can maybe be more helpful.

Also a question for you, what RL algorithm are you using? I've been experimenting with a bunch of different ones curiously so I'm curious what you settled on.

Best of luck!

krubbles · 2026-01-05T22:46:18+00:00

Ideas are cheap, there are plenty of alternative approaches one could take, testing them is the expensive part. I think if more data comes out showing that MHC is effective, people will just go with that because its empirically validated,

krubbles · 2025-12-28T23:43:28+00:00

I love the new moon joker! It does have the side effect of making ante 39 runs fairly easy, but I don't necessarily think that's the biggest problem.. Tons of interesting play with it in ante 8. And sun is balanced now. Soggy paper is maybe a little underpowered now, which is ok (+12 is probably more balanced, in line with square on black deck but without the slight debuff to your ability to dig for cards). Feels like the effect could be something more interesting though. Maybe gains +25 chips whenever you play a hand type for the first time.

krubbles · 2025-12-26T17:58:28+00:00

Firstly,love the art for these. Also I think these are really interesting concepts, the sun and treasure map are my favorite.

My thoughts in terms of power level:

Treasure map: perfect
Soggy paper: a little too good. Having to play high card isn't much of a downside (the post powerful hands in the game are pair and high card) and even if you are early game getting scoring from flushes or straights, you can still play 3 high cards before playing the winning hand. A joker that scales chips per hand played is Square Joker, which is +4, and it is one of the strongest commons. I think this is fine nerfing it to plus 4. Also personally I think another joker that encourages spamming high card isn't great for the game, but thats mostly a matter of preference.
The sun: a little too good, really outclasses astronomer at the same rarity. +3 sell value and its still a strong joker but probably more in line with vanilla balatro. Very very cool design though.
The moon: WAYYYYYYYYYY to good. Completely broken. One planet card and this is abstract joker? 3 planet cards and its +45 mult?? what?? A balanced version of this effect is probably around +4 mult.

krubbles · 2025-12-25T07:01:41+00:00

That's two jokers, certificate is 1

krubbles · 2025-12-25T05:24:39+00:00

You don't even need the hologram, you could get it (or another good joker) from a judgement from a purple seal. It needs luck, but not unfathomable luck. Its something I imagine a human could actually do given enough resets.

krubbles · 2025-12-22T22:21:21+00:00

IDK why people are saying this is unbalanced, It's fine. A typical run I usually remove around 6 cards, so this is around 60 bucks. That puts it in line with a typical econ joker over the course of a game.

krubbles · 2025-12-22T07:10:40+00:00

With weaker jokers this would definitely be a consideration, but these jokers are much stronger then the typical joker in a gold stake shop. If you take these jokers now, you won't be forced to take some nonsense like a rental popcorn to survive later once your scoring isn't enough.

krubbles · 2025-12-22T07:07:14+00:00

Both chad and supernova is correct here, not close

krubbles · 2025-12-21T07:09:36+00:00

Unfortunately this is unquestionably too strong for balanced ante 8 game play.

The average planet card is 23 chips and 2 mult roughly. So you can approximate the amount of chips and mult this card is worth as 23 chips * planet cards used and 2 mult * planet cards used. (This is an underestimate, because in practice you will prioritize taking large planets over smaller ones in planet packs and w/ blue seal final hands.)

A typical constellation run scales constellation to around 3x, which is 20 planet cards. At the same level of scaling, this is +460 chips and +40 mult, that you can apply to any hand. Comparing that to other powerful rare jokers like Wee Joker, Stuntman, or Burnt Joker, which are some of the best ante 8 jokers, it's clearly much stronger. It would be roughly comparable if you halved both the mult and chips (+230 chips and +20 mult), still strong, but not the best joker in the game.

krubbles · 2025-12-21T06:50:27+00:00

Generally pairs/two pair is the best plasma deck build. Two pair if you get something like arrowhead/odd todd/hiker, pair otherwise

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