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 9. Generating a 3D Planet

So far we've tackled 2D content generation and some complex sound generation. You made a 2D Roguelike game that can continually generate game content for as long as the player can survive. However, with our 2D game complete, it's time to add another dimension to our PCG learning and move into 3D.

In this chapter, we will be procedurally generating a 3D planet. You can see an example of a procedurally generated shape in the following figure. Then, just for fun, we'll add the scripts necessary to take a first person view walk on that planet. However, 3D does pose some new considerations when applying PCG. Here's what you can expect to learn in this chapter:

  • 2D versus 3D rendering

  • Space and time complexity of 3D object generation

  • 3D geometry considerations with PCG

    A procedurally generated sphere

Generating 3D objects is basically graphics programming. Math can be used to describe everything around us in a geometric sense. Then, we take that math and make it an algorithm...