Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By : Dale Green
Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By: Dale Green

Overview of this book

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease. Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Project breakdown


Our game project started as a blank roguelike template with limited functionality, but with our work, we turned it into a fully fledged procedural roguelike game. Let's run through the project to identify how we used procedural generation to do so.

We'll also identify some further possible exercises for each chapter if you wish to explore the topic in detail. The goal of this book was to introduce you to the fundamentals of the topic, so hopefully you can hit the ground running as you take this further.

Procedurally populating environments

We started by spawning game items randomly around the level. This involved the generation of random numbers within a given range and using those as tile indices and enumerator values. This was the first time we used random numbers and enumerators to select random values and items, which is a technique that we relied heavily on throughout the course of the book.

If you wished to take this further, you could have a look at how to bias the spawn...