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

PCG algorithm overview


Now that we settled on our data structure for managing our Game Board grid, we need to design our algorithm for placing tiles. This algorithm will use two types of PCG. We will only create tiles that the player discovers, which is a form of player-triggered PCG. We will also use random numbers to dictate the look of the tile and to choose which floor tiles will have a wall tile placed on top.

To start our algorithm design, let's imagine and try to visualize a use case. We want our player to start in a small area that has already been revealed and added to our data structure. When the game starts, let's create a 5 x 5 grid of tiles for an initial Game Board. We can then place our player character in the center of the grid initially.

The initial Game Board grid with the player

As the player explores, our algorithm will reveal more tiles in the direction the player is headed. We will refer to this as the player's line of sight. We can use any arbitrary number of tiles to...