Sam Swain ➡ Develop:Brighton

@sam.apparance.uk

1116 Followers 314 Following

A child of the procedural generation. Long-time tools coder off of the games industry. Worked on Fable, NMS, Gloomhaven. Building crazy proc-gen technology: www.apparance.uk 👈 Try Unreal & Unity plugin for free! he/him ▪ forever 42 ▪ surrey, uk ▪ no AI

The Apparance Team in front of a large screen showcasing some of the procedural generation magic the team is known for.
Apparance. Procedural Generation Experts. Tools, Technology, Training, Team.
Purple conference flash across corner: Develop, Insight, Inspiration, Networking. 14th to 16th July 2026.

WARNING.
No Stable Person Surfaced.
This result was weightless AKA weak AF.

Tweet of mine from February 7th 2021 that says "Woot, recursive geometry synthesis procedures working! Hashtag Cryptic" (zero retweets, zero likes)

Shooting a series of holes in a double-skinned wooden plank wall using a shotgun and grenades before walking through the hole to the other side.

EPC stage, Apparance sponsor message on screen.

Two seemingly unconnected posts together in a timeline. Both featuring three figures, top is three cats, bottom is three red skeleton drawings (and the number three).

Bluesky prompt asks me "What's up?"
David Lindsey Pittman post below where he states "Z is up".
He also states two other things he "will fight you about": The Big Lebowski is the best film ever made and All cats are beautiful.

To Do List product details image showing various fake images of the notepad in use and it's features.

Many cable loops hanging from the ceiling, animated quantity from none to loads and back.

Room doorway moving left and right, with dividers either side and all the clutter stacked around adjusting to match.

A Ginsters Vegan Quorn Pasty in wrapper.

Two postage options:
1. Saturday 13 Dec - Friday 19 Dec, Free Standard Delivery (selected).
2. Tomorrow, 5 Dec, £150 Same Day.

A selection of various sizes of glass panel pieces in the foreground with a procedural space filling railing being resized in the background. Shows it reconfiguring according to which pieces fit best.

Cropped shot from Unreal developer forums. A question about scripting/coding answered seven years ago by none-other than myself.

Space station room with various configurations of objects stacked within.

Space staion room progressively filling up with crates and emptying again. Procedurally generated and driven. In Unreal 5 using a couple of sci-fi Fab asset packs.

Space station room with gradually increasing and decreasing quantity of stacked crates down both sides of the room.

Sci-fi crate storage into the distance, a light at the end of the tunnel.

Travelling forward through a procedurally generated sci-fi space station storage locker, lots of crates either side, brightly lit doorway ahead, all in white/grey/metal finish.

Space station room with live height change animation showing wall structures updating to accommodate the size being changed.

Space station rooms animating between being separated and adjoining with doorways between.

Funky Diagnostics! Procedural Labels! Episode #9 (last week).
Me in the corner waving. Unreal Editor in background showing procedural space station rooms with blue and red diagnostics boxes and labels.

Road with sign saying "Unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles"

Map of where A3 crosses M25 showing closed road (black) and my intended route (green) with the crazy long diversion route (red).

The four ace card designs in the Fable card deck

Microsoft Solitaire app with the Fable theme card deck and background.

Lone ice-cream van on a wide flat wet beach, the grey sea behind with a few people in, and the grey sky beyond.

The IBM PC & PS2 programming guide book. A.k.a. the pink shirt book. As featured in the film Hackers.

The first six issues of Lock-On premium games journal stacked on my desk,

Space station wall section, a doorway scrolls into view, and the hatch opens and shuts before scrolling off again.

Space station room built from white sci-fi panels, interesting floor patterns change every second as the seed parameter is incremented.

Interioir of a large white panelled space station room with some windows, and greebled wall sections.

Four rectangular floor and ceiling objects with changing patterns of asset tiles.

Me over the top of the Unreal Editor showing a section of space-station wall and the Apparance Editor showing one of the procedure graphs that build it.

Small rectangular space-station room on a checkered floor. The right hand end is highlighted yellow with the cursor visible pointing to it.

Simple sci-fi space station room interior built from modular assets, assembled procedurally and rendered in Unreal 5.

Space station parts asset pack

Crew pass riveted to a bit of lanyard, with several wrist bands. From Glastonbury and WOMAD festivals 1990 to 1993.

Blue metal cylindrical maze puzzle sitting on it's box packaging with thankyou card, all on my desk.

Seagull on the bonnet of a car, viewed from inside, against a carpark background. It has a Develop pass on a lanyard around its neck. The name on the pass is "C. Gul". A speech bubble from the bird says "Come chat #Proc-Gen at Develop".

Duck-duck-go search for "uk weather map" showing summary weather results for "Uk, Russia" (mostly clear, 19 degrees sunny)

Box image of topless fit map standing in small inflatable ice-bath.

Apparance proc-gen plugin marketplace title image. Various procedurally generated scenes are shown in the background; bookshelves, girders, curtains, stage trussing, buildings. Text reads: Apparance. Procedural Generation System. Interactive Parametric Content Authoring for Games. Explore, Create, Play, Iterate. Epic Mega-grants Recipient.

Moody dark landscape with three objects projecting laser beams that case various shapes and colours across it.

Simple gloomy landscape and evening sky. Cuboid floating in the sky emits green laser casting bright line across the ground as it slowly scans back and forth.

Photo birthday cards on a shop shelf, but most of them are AI generated slop.

Top half is a view of the hotel that hosts the Develop:Reboot Blue conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Bottom half is a view of the University building that hosts the Everything Procedural Conference in Breda, in the Netherlands.

Lizard Doggo plushie from the game Satisfactory, sitting on a stickered laptop against a wooden background. His name is Terrance (Terry for short) and he's sporting a Fable collar, Unreal leash, and Boris the Brave badge.

Everything Procedural, EPC 2025, 22nd to 25th April 2025. Conference on procedural generation for games.

Black cat lounging on wooden floor.

Bigtrak on a shelf

Hemispherical chocolates on a wooden desk. Half Moonies from Montezuma's. Two are stacked together to form a sphere but have a tiny screwdriver keeping the two halves apart. A small clear plastic case nearby contains a couple more tiny screwdrivers.

Darkly lit desk with three monitors showing graphics card hardware failure corruption (white square dots scattered across them). Pacman toy lamp and plush lizzard-doggo look on unimpressed.

Black cat flooped on a wooden floor.

Snowy landscape with cabins, gifts, forests, giant gift piles and huge fir trees decorated with shiny colored baubles. Message reads: wishing you all a very merry xmas and an amazing 2025 from the Apparance team.

An upholstered chair on parquet floor in front of wood panelled walls. But its a talllllll chair.

Sparkly decorated christmas tree with bright strings of lights and baubles against patio doors on wood floor.

Here is a slightly earlier version of the Town Toy in action. Showing off the in-world custom editing handles, editing modes, and interactive editing of size, shape, and properties. Various overviews of the landscape with buildings and forests being added and manipulated. At various points the theme is switched to a festive snowy version with decorated trees and log cabins.