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

Concept of music


Music has existed for many years. It's prehistoric to be precise, and has evolved into a very complicated construct. Even though it is complicated and could take you many years of education to master, music can be very formulaic. The fact that we can abstract the idea of music as a formula is what will allow us to make an algorithm to generate it.

Tempo

The first thing we need to understand is that a song will follow a tempo. The tempo of a song is the speed at which the song progresses. Every sound within the song falls within some range of the tempo by an equal measure. That measure is usually at pace with the tempo, at 1/4th, at 1/8th, or at 1/16th. The tempo as seen in the following figure:

Visualization of tempo

This might sound strange if you have never heard it before. We can visualize each sound following a tempo as dots on a line or in a graph. The tempo can be seen as a vertical line that moves in the positive direction on the x axis. Each time the tempo line intersects...