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


You are just about finished with our PCG 2D Roguelike game! In this chapter, we added the component of enemy opposition and made the difficulty scale with the player.

In this chapter, you added enemies to the game that inherited the same base class as the Player class. In PCG fashion, you spawned the enemies at random and had to handle destroying the enemies at the appropriate times. You set up monitoring of the player to scale the difficulty. Instead of just upping the hit points or strength of the enemies to scale the difficulty, you made them faster and smarter by developing a more efficient AI.

We did quite a bit in this chapter, but there is a lot more that we can still do to improve the system. You should continue experimenting with adaptive difficulty. See how much you can improve the AI to make smart enemies with better pathfinding and possibly wall breaking like the player. You can also use randomness to determine how smart an enemy is. Then, you can differentiate between...