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

Editing the game tiles


The final system that we're going to look at is going to lay the groundwork for something that is coming later in the book. We're going to create a system to make each floor of the dungeon a unique environment, implementing what we know about sprite modification on the game tiles.

The goal of the game is to progress through as many floors as you can, getting the highest possible score. In Chapter 9, Procedural Dungeon Generation, we're going to look at how to generate dungeons procedurally, and after every five floors, we'll change the theme. Let's create the function that we will use later in the book to accomplish this.

The best way to solve this is to add a function to the Level object that sets the color of all the tile sprites. This will be a public function as we'll be calling it from the main game class.

Let's start by defining the sf::color function in the Level header, as follows:

public:
  /**
   * Sets the overlay color of the level tiles.
   * @param tileColor...