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

Models


3D models, as you saw in Chapter 9, Generating a 3D Planet, can be extraordinarily complicated. It is natural we created programs that allow designers to sculpt in a digital 3D space as opposed to trying to create an algorithm that would generate these 3D models. A simple sphere can take thousands of lines of code to create alone.

Allowing a person to sculpt and see the creation of the model as it is being created allows for an unparalleled level of detail. It would simply take too long to try and procedurally generate every 3D model in a game. So, we generally stick to procedurally manipulating models.

The trade-off then is to make small pieces of a model that can be widely used and then having those procedurally constructed into a whole model at runtime. The effect is that we create a game world that is unique to that playthrough. It could be possible that the game world morphs every time the player starts a new game or just that this game world is unique to another player's game...