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

Seeding the dungeon


We can set a seed value for any dungeon to recreate that dungeon. There is a simple way to test this as well. In the DungeonManager.cs file, add the line Random.seed = 1; to the top of the definition of the StartDungeon function.

Now return to the Unity Editor and play the game. Enter a dungeon and take a screenshot of the overview. Then, end the game and play again. Enter a dungeon and compare its overview to that of the screenshot. You will see that they have the exact same shape.

This is how we can destroy an entire randomly generated dungeon, yet return to it at a later time. You can adapt this line of code for situations such as having a player return to a dungeon to complete a task. For now, you can comment this line out because we won't be using it for our game, but feel free to experiment.