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

Texture


One thing that really ties together a level or character design is texture. This is the very reason textures are designed by human hands. They usually convey a specific tone. But one thing that we can use to our advantage is the fact that a lot of textures happen naturally.

This would be similar to the stripes on a tiger. Realistically, we wouldn't see a constant pattern around the tiger, though. We would have to break the tiger up into sections of texture such as, the most prominent stripes would be on the back and they would fade as it wrapped to the stomach.

Procedurally generated animal and textures (No Man's Sky)

One way to accomplish this is to have animals of a similar shape so that the texture map will apply similarly to the different animal models. The textures can be tinted in different colors so that the animal shape and color will stand out over the texture, which is more ambient. Also, making the colors of the texture similar will blend the texture patterns and make the...