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

The random potion class


For the biggest class update, we'll turn our attention to the potion class. This class currently has a fixed sprite and doesn't give the player anything. With the humanoid class, we can generate a random type and essentially create two different enemies from a single class. We're going to use this same approach for the potions.

Creating a random potion

To start, let's define an enumerator in Util.h that denotes all potion types. We'll create one for each stat, as follows:

// Potions.
enum class POTION {
  ATTACK,
  DEFENSE,
  STRENGTH,
  DEXTERITY,
  STAMINA,
  COUNT
};

To save a lot of typing, the potion class already has the member variables and the getter functions for each possible stat, we just need to use them. One thing that we will add is a variable to hold the potion type, and a function to return it. We'll need this information when picking the object up!

Let's declare the following in Potion.h:

public:
  /**
   * Gets the potion type.
   * @return The potion...