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

Summary


This completes our exploration into the 3D realm of PCG. There is a lot more to do and explore here but most of it requires a strong foundation in graphics programming and mathematics. Try experimenting with the techniques that you have learned in this book to generate 3D objects and possibly randomizing them in some way.

A good start to your self-learning would be to procedurally change the colors of your planet. See if you can write a script that will randomize the colors on the materials of the planet as we did in Chapter 5, Randomized Items. You can also refine the land creation process and make modular continents as well.

In this chapter, we discussed the changes from 2D versus 3D rendering. You learned about the importance of space and time complexity. You learned that there is usually more than one way to make a 3D object. Lastly, you learned that PCG with 3D requires quite a bit of highly specific mathematics.

You learned all about PCG both in 2D and 3D. We have completed all...