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

Story


Adding in the functionality for a player to influence the outcome of a game story can look much like a state machine as well. Usually, these state machines are much less complicated though. There are certain things that can't be generated well quite yet like voiceovers in terms of tone and conveying emotion.

Players have come to expect a certain level of storytelling so when certain things are difficult to produce, it narrows the availability of additions like multiple storylines. What keeps procedural storytelling to a minimum is the fact that what makes a good story is very subjective. Physics and graphics are all based on hard math but story is based on opinion. And we don't want to deliver a subpar story to our player.

With that in mind, we could map out elements to a story or several stories combined. Then, we could either randomly choose the arrangement of story path states that we want the player to follow, or we could react to the player's behavior in certain events. This is...