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

Summary


For this chapter, we couldn't avoid adding in some art assets, but we were able to take those assets and multiply them. We figured out a good way to randomly place Items by implementing some health Items. Then, we expanded on that by spawning Chests that contain random armor Items. We only used two sprites for our armor Items but turned them into essentially eight different items.

You learned how to take some elements in our game environment and use them to our advantage, such as the wall tile yielding food items. You learned how to take a more subtle approach to randomly spawning assets into the game. We used highly guided PRNs to determine types of Items. You learned how to use something such as color to change the look of an item enough to make it a new item. And finally, we created a simple inventory base that can be expanded upon.

We are going to continue with the item theme in the next chapter. We have health items to heal us from enemy attacks and we have armor items to protect...