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

Adaptive difficulty


Adaptive difficulty can be a content generation solution by having enemies carry improved equipment or changing enemy properties such as color and textures. It can also be an Artificial Intelligence question. This is similar to choosing the hard mode at the beginning of a game except, you, the game creator, determine when to engage the hard mode based on some gameplay aspect.

We have already done things such as swapping sprites and changing colors based on strength, so we will be exploring the AI route. We will determine what it takes to adapt the difficulty to the player by changing the AI of the enemy. Eventually, the player will become so strong that one hit from the player will destroy an enemy. So, we want the enemies to be capable of overwhelming the player by getting to the player faster, more efficiently, and in greater numbers.

In order to do this, we will need to adjust the AI capabilities in the Enemy class. But first, we will set-up the flags that will determine...