It seems like every game now wants to brag about having a procedurally generated world, galaxy or universe as if this is a selling point.  Procedural generation has become the game industry's equivalent of CGI where what started out as a useful tool in the hand of designers has become increasingly used as a replacement for design.

Stardock's upcoming space RPG, Star Control: Origins has plenty of procedurally generated worlds.  With thousands of planets to explore, there's no way to hand-craft every single one.  But procedural generation in the game exists to serve the story and writers.  Because when it comes to the story and the adventures and the quests, each one is hand-crafted by professional Science Fiction writers.

Part 1: A living universe that is also hand-crafted

Step 1: Use a real star map. 

We humans know what stars are near by and what they are called.  For stars that are further away and start having number designations, Stardock gave them colorful names for players to remember.  Other than certain exoplanets, we don't really know what's around them.

Step 2: Deciding how solar systems should be depicted

Stardock has to decide early on how realistic to make its solar systems for Star Control.  The classic Star Control series was limited to single stars with limited numbers of planets and moons.  Star Control: Origins, supports binary star systems, brown dwarfs and no practical limit on the number of planets in a system.  Thus, the question really came down to game-play.  What was fun?

Step 3: Procedurally generate the solar systems.

The Star Control team then took from their Galactic Civilizations experience and built an app that would generate the planets around the stars using lots of different rules for gameplay.  Red stars tended to have more of certain classes of planets while blue stars have a different set of rules. 

A procedurally generated star would do a fine job creating a decent, if otherwise unremarkable solar system.  This is when the writers get involved.

Step 3: Coming up with a story

While the main story-arc of Star Control: Origins is handled by the lead writer at Stardock, the rest of the map is divided up and handed out to writers who begin crafting their own stories.

So for example, in this solar system, there are two advanced and competing civilizations who are fighting over a planet to colonize in that system.  They don't have fast-than-light travel so the entire drama takes place in just this one star system.

Step 4: The writer modifies the solar system

Right from in-game, the writer can bring up the Stellar Cartography tools and begin editing the solar system.

Now the writer can make this solar system have its own story.

The end result is a solar system with 3 stars in it.  The main primary star and two dwarf stars.  The purpose here is to set up the conflict.  There are now four habitable planets and a "Jewel" class planet (rich).  The two inner habitable planets are our conflicting planets and the other planets are the ones they're competing with. 

Step 5: The Story

In Star Control, every story is hand-crafted.

When Stardock is asked why they went this path, their answer is that the problem with randomly generated quests and missions is that they assume players are playing the game to simply "get stuff" and the story and the lore is just filler.  But Stardock believes that the story is the reward and that look exists to allow players to access new stories.

However, making it easy for writers to create stories involved a great deal of effort.  For example, Stardock's business software unit was employed to develop "Adventure Studio" whose task was to allow science fiction writers to be able to craft stories with a minimum of effort that could also take advantage of Stardock's powerful scripting abilities.  This way, different authors could write their own stories that others could pick up on since any author can create a "variable" on the fly and those variables become accessible to every other author to make use of allowing them to tie together stories in unexpected ways.

Procedural Generation is a tool, not a goal

Procedural generation helped cut down the grunt work in developing the Star Control: Origins universe.  But it wasn't intended to substitute for story-telling.  Exploration is a means to an end, not the ends unto itself.  Every crashed ship, every enemy pirate every refugee and every hero you encounter was placed there as part of an intertwined story.  Procedural generation ensured that the writers had time to focus on their stories. The technology is designed to serve the writers not the other way around.

Next up: Thousands of unique planets

(every planet is procedurally generated to start with but the writers can then flesh out planets for story-telling purposes)