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

Data structures


Now that we know the instruction set of our dungeon creation, we need to figure out how we plan to store the dungeon board. We are building the Dungeon Board in a similar manner that we built the world board, so we might be able to use similar data structures. There are enough differences though, that we will need to evaluate what works best.

Back to the map

We are using a dictionary to store our world board because it has an easy and fast lookup method, plus it can be added to dynamically. For all those same reasons, we can use a dictionary to store the important points in our dungeon. Remember, we don't need to know every point in the dungeon, we only need to know the essential and random paths.

The tricky part is that we need to place the essential path first but then revisit every point in the path to potentially add a random branch. There is the option to iterate over the dictionary where we are storing our dungeon. However, we will be adding new points to the dictionary...