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

Exploring the planet


Now that we have generated a planet, it would be awesome if we could explore the surface of it. As a fun bonus, we will add a first-person-view controller, so we can explore our planets. Fortunately for us, someone has already tackled the problem of spherical gravity in Unity, so all we will have to do is plug and play.

You can get the script for this section either from the example files or from its source at https://github.com/SebLague/Spherical-Gravity by SebLague. There is also a video at that location where you can see how the scripts work. The scripts that are included are the FirstPersonController.cs, GravityAttractor.cs, and GravityBody.cs.

You are welcome to view the video to get an explanation on the code in these scripts. We are just going to plug them in and use them as they are, though. You'll want to add the GravityAttractor script to the Water object. Set a tag for the Water sphere to Planet. Then, create a capsule for our first person controller by navigating...