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

Setting up the project


Let's set up our base project. There will be two methods we will cover in setting up this project. You can either import the provided Unity package or you can follow through the code explanations in the File Overview section and write the code by hand. Either way, it is highly advised that you read through the code explanations to understand the structure of how the project operates.

Importing the base project

We will import a package that will contain more assets and use them right away. However, keep in mind that we will use all the assets eventually. All of the files are explained in the File Overview section of this chapter:

  1. Start by opening up Unity and creating a new project. Select 2D and then Create Project. We won't need to import any Standard Asset packages for this project.

  2. Once in Unity Editor, navigate to Assets | Import Packages | Custom Package... from the top menu bar. Navigate to the directory where you saved the code files that accompany this book. In...