Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development

By : Ryan Watkins
Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development

By: Ryan Watkins

Overview of this book

Procedural Content Generation is a process by which game content is developed using computer algorithms, rather than through the manual efforts of game developers. This book teaches readers how to develop algorithms for procedural generation that they can use in their own games. These concepts are put into practice using C# and Unity is used as the game development engine. This book provides the fundamentals of learning and continued learning using PCG. You'll discover the theory of PCG and the mighty Pseudo Random Number Generator. Random numbers such as die rolls and card drafting provide the chance factor that makes games fun and supplies spontaneity. This book also takes you through the full development of a 2D game. Starting with level generation, you'll learn how PCG can make the game environment for you. You'll move into item generation and learn the different techniques to procedurally create game items. Thereafter, you'll be guided through the more abstract PCG areas such as scaling difficulty to the player and even generating music! The book helps you set up systems within your games where algorithms create computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, stories, characters, and weapons; these can substantially reduce the burden of manually creating every aspect of the game. Finally, you'll get to try out your new PCG skills on 3D terrain generation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Procedural Content Generation for Unity Game Development
Credits
Disclaimer
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


So you learned quite a bit of theory in this chapter and just touched the surface of how to apply it to games in Unity. You went over an introduction to PCG and why and how to use it. You were also introduced to PRNs and to how they are generated. We discussed what makes PRNs different from your average random number and the benefit a seed provides. You also learned why and how to use PRNs and then completed an example expanding on the classic Hello World program.

So what's left? Well, we are gearing up to build a fully functional game throughout this book. We are going to look at some of the more popular applications of PCG in video games. In the next chapter, we are going to briefly get acquainted with Roguelike games, which is a popular game subgenre. Roguelike games are known for their procedurally generated content, so it is a perfect fit for our learning adventure.