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

Generating health items in the game world


Eventually, our player will be fighting for survival against an onslaught of baddies. It is inevitable that the player will take some health damage, so we need to provide a way for him or her to recover and continue playing. Providing the player with health recovery items is the most common approach. So, we will do just that but as usual we want to procedurally generate the items.

Rather than just randomly laying our health item tiles about the world board, we can use the environment we have created to add a layer of interactivity. The wall tiles that inhabit the world board are already laid at random. They are also destructible. We can, thus, use the wall tiles as a potential container for our health items.

By doing this, we have added a layer of game play for the player. The player now has to forage for their health items while confronted by foes. This should add to the suspense, difficulty, and reward factors, which contribute to the overall fun...