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

Physics


Physics is very well defined as a theory, so it translates well to programming simulations and subsequently, game design. However, physics is a separate field from PCG. Still, physics can be used to aid us in our execution of PCG.

An example of using physics as a mechanism of PCG is the popular mobile game, Angry Birds. In Angry Birds, a modular structure is presented but it then has physics applied to it as a means to restructure it. The effects of the physics create new structures that then impact how the game is played.

The Angry Birds' gameplay is based on physics

The trade-off is that physics requires a lot of processing power. Current technology now provides dedicated hardware to processing just the physical simulations in games. It can add very unique game playthrough.

Physics is its own field of study, so it is a good place to start when researching new ways to apply physics to PCG. There are a lot of physics engines available such as the Open Dynamic Engine, so it might be more...