Roy Tang

Procedural generation is a form of random generation; except that when you say procedural generation, you expect that there are more rules than just randomly putting any set of results together.

An example of procedural generation would be map generation in games like Civilization. If it were completely random, you would often see ice areas near the equator or next to desert areas or other such tile placements that make no sense. Instead it’s procedural, there’s certain rules followed like for each type of terrain, there’s a given probability that it will be beside this other type of terrain, and there are other rules and algorithms to ensure things like continents or achipelagos form well.