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

Adding a third dimension


Unity makes 2D game development very easy. Don't forget that underneath Unity's user interface, there are a lot of calculations being done for us. In many other graphics rendering engines, we would have to write the code that creates the 2D square that we can then draw our sprite on. With Unity, we simply add a component or two. In the following figure, we can see a 2D sprite from a 3D perspective. A sprite is after all just a quad that is rendered facing the camera.

The 2D quad a sprite is drawn onto

Unity also makes 3D game development much easier. Instead of using quads for sprite rendering, in 3D, we will work from 3D models. A 3D model is a collection of vertices, or points, in 3D space. We then connect those dots and make faces or triangles. This comprises the wireframe structure and surface of our model.

For most games, a 3D model is created by a 3D modeling program or software and then imported into Unity. We will then assign appropriate components to the imported...