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

Procedurally generating an enemy class


Now that the player is well and truly generated procedurally, let's apply some of this to the enemies. We currently have two main enemy classes, namely Slime and Humanoid. Slime is a simple slime enemy, but our humanoid class is here for us to expand upon. Currently, the class loads the sprites of a skeleton, but let's make it so that it can be a number of humanoid-like enemies; in our case, it will be either a goblin or a skeleton.

We could have made individual classes for these enemies, but since most of their code will be the same, it doesn't make sense. Instead, we have this ambiguous humanoid class that can take the form of a humanoid enemy. All that we need to do is change the sprite, and the way we distribute stats if we want them to play differently. From this we can create a great number of different enemies from a single class. We'll use this same approach on potions soon!

For now, we'll start by defining an enumerator in Util.h to denote the...