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

Initial Game Board


Now that we have our algorithm designed and the Unity Editor setup, we can start our code implementation. We'll approach the task in small pieces. First, let's put down a small starting area for our player. As stated before, we will make a 5 x 5 grid to lay floor tiles on. The lower-left corner will be placed at (0,0) and the upper-right corner at (4,4) with the player character at (2,2).

We'll start by building our BoardManager class. Open up BoardManager.cs for editing. Currently, there is only a public class called Count, but we are about to change that. Code Snip 3.1 shows the additions we want to make to BoardManager.cs:

1 using UnityEngine;
2 using System;
3 using System.Collections.Generic; 
4 using Random = UnityEngine.Random;
5
6 public class BoardManager : MonoBehaviour {
7   [Serializable]
8   public class Count {
9     public int minimum;
10    public int maximum;
11    
12    public Count (int min, int max) {
13      minimum = min;
14      maximum = max;
15...