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 7. Adaptive Difficulty

In Chapter 2, Roguelike Games, we imported an Enemy prefab and an Enemy script but we haven't used either of them yet. So far, our character has been wandering around an empty world collecting food and items. But that is all about to change because in this chapter, we are going to add brain hungry zombies that scale in difficulty and test the player's strength.

Player among enemies!

Adaptive difficulty can be solely a PCG solution or it can, in part, rely on an artificial intelligence (AI) solution. Our main goal with PCG is to expand the playtime and game content. Normally, when we think of PCG, we think of content such as art assets being programmatically created or new game objects being added to the game at runtime. We can also think of PCG as a means to expand the game's complexity internally as well.

We will be adding enemies to both the world board and Dungeon Board. At first, the enemies won't be very dangerous as they are slow and not good at navigating...