Procedural content is a phenomenally powerful tool for game development, utterly crucial to companies like Introversion and basically ignored by the bigger boys in favour of banks of expensive artists. For those that have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, Procedural content is basically content that has been generated automatically by a computer algorithm, rather than hand crafted by an artist. So for example I could hire an artist to sculpt a mountain surrounded by some hills, and he could work for hours carving out caves and rock faces and etching detail into the surface. The more detail I require, the longer my artist has to work and the more it costs me. As the years roll by, the bar is gradually raised and the amount of detail required for todays models is extraordinary – the time and money required goes up every year.

read more about this amazing piece of software here:
http://www.introversion.co.uk/blog/

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=586

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=733