RAPID: Rebellion Adaptive Procedural technology for Intelligent game Development

RAPID is a 24 month project to develop a prototype toolkit to assist, improve and accelerate
the development of video games by the application of procedural methods for automatic and
semi-automatic content generation and performance tailoring. The toolkit will contain
components to assist the design and population of worlds for high-quality games;
automatically to generate new levels and gameplay for mobile games; automatically to
prevent the creation of impossible or unrealisable designs; and tools that automatically match
the environment geometry complexity to platform capacity and bandwidth.
The video games industry is at a crossroads. At the top end of the market, the cost of
developing and marketing ‘AAA’ games can match movie blockbusters. At the other end, lowcost
and ‘free-to-play’ mobile games have become hugely popular, but creating the new levels
to retain player engagement is very difficult to do affordably and developers struggle to make
money. UK studios are squeezed at both ends of the market.
RAPID will result in new algorithms for procedural content development, new procedural
approaches to game delivery and gameplay, a modular procedural software toolkit (to support
the creation of AAA and mobile games by Rebellion, and services for the procedural
development of games and gameplay by other companies, including micro studios. We plan
to offer a free, basic automatic service, and a premium paid service, in which Rebellion will
run a developer’s plan through the full procedural engine and toolkit to deliver a detailed
mobile games level or high quality environment.
Rebellion is one of Europe’s leading games developers and publishers. It is the studio behind
numerous hit games (including Sniper Elite V2, Sniper Elite: Zombie Army, Aliens vs
Predator, The Simpsons, and Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron), a successful
publisher of comics and books, and a producer of cross-platform entertainment media.