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 3. Generating an Endless World

Our base project is setup and ready to be expanded upon. You received an intro to PRNs and PCG by making a quick Hello World program. However, it is time to develop a fully functional PCG algorithm that can be directly applied to our Roguelike game.

Our game has the base functionality of a player character capable of movement by player input. In this chapter, we will create the tile-based Game Board that the player will explore. This Game Board will expand itself as the player moves, and as there are no bounds, the board is potentially infinite. In this chapter, you can expect:

  • To learn about dynamic data structures

  • To design our first PCG algorithm

  • To set up a scene that allows for an ever expanding game world

  • To develop our PCG Game Board

By the end of the chapter, you will have developed a PCG game world that is unique with every play. Plus, you will have achieved this with a relatively small amount of assets. We have to do some learning and planning first...