When I was looking over wplace for my local area, I actually had my girlfriend lean in to my monitor at one point and go "Is that Naomi??" (It turned out to be Yoruichi from Bleach, but I thought you might be amused that BEP is what came to mind for her *first*)

It's easy to make 'infinite variations' of a thing, but hard to make those variations feel meaningfully different - and they *have* to or what's even the point? So, imo, the designer has to tackle that question from the get-go: not just 'how do levels vary?' but 'why should the player care?'

I have definitely played my share of games with procgen maps that felt like they really just wanted to avoid having to make maps at all, and that isn't really how it works. If everything feels interchangeable with everything else, then it's hard to feel invested in exploring anything at all.

Not to criticize well-meaning devs, but it's always felt like there's this fundamental misunderstanding among some not experienced with procgen that using it makes it *less work* to make maps. It only makes it less work to make infinite *boring* maps. Infinite *good* maps is actually much harder.

The key is that good handmade procgen *makes use of* handmade stuff quite heavily. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup has something like 5500 handmade map pieces (each with handmade sub-randomization!) that it inserts among its entirely procedural level layouts and those are what *gives* it texture.