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

Chapter 2. Roguelike Games

This chapter will introduce a popular video game subgenre known for its use of PCG, called Roguelike. In the second half of the chapter, we will be setting up our Roguelike project, which will be used for the rest of the book. Here is an overview of what to expect in this chapter:

  • Discovering Roguelike games

  • Learning why Roguelike is a perfect fit for our PCG project

  • Setting up our project

This chapter will begin our intermediate level work in Unity. From this point onward, it is best that you have a fundamental knowledge of the Unity Editor and C# scripting. As a reminder, this project was built using the current version of Unity (5.2.2), so there will be some incompatibilities with previous versions. The files used to set up the project will be included in the accompanying files under Chapter 2. However, all of the code files will be covered in the chapter for those of you who prefer to write them out yourselves.

We will be working from an existing project including...