Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By : Dale Green
Book Image

Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development

By: Dale Green

Overview of this book

Procedural generation is a growing trend in game development. It allows developers to create games that are bigger and more dynamic, giving the games a higher level of replayability. Procedural generation isn’t just one technique, it’s a collection of techniques and approaches that are used together to create dynamic systems and objects. C++ is the industry-standard programming language to write computer games. It’s at the heart of most engines, and is incredibly powerful. SFML is an easy-to-use, cross-platform, and open-source multimedia library. Access to computer hardware is broken into succinct modules, making it a great choice if you want to develop cross-platform games with ease. Using C++ and SFML technologies, this book will guide you through the techniques and approaches used to generate content procedurally within game development. Throughout the course of this book, we’ll look at examples of these technologies, starting with setting up a roguelike project using the C++ template. We’ll then move on to using RNG with C++ data types and randomly scattering objects within a game map. We will create simple console examples to implement in a real game by creating unique and randomised game items, dynamic sprites, and effects, and procedurally generating game events. Then we will walk you through generating random game maps. At the end, we will have a retrospective look at the project. By the end of the book, not only will you have a solid understanding of procedural generation, but you’ll also have a working roguelike game that you will have extended using the examples provided.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Procedural Content Generation for C++ Game Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A brief history of rogue-like games


Since we're going to implement what we are learning in a rogue-like, let's just take a second to look at their history. It's always great to understand the origins of the things that you are doing!

Rogue is a dungeon crawling game that was first developed by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman and initially released in 1980. Every level of the dungeon was randomly generated along with the positions of the object within. Rogue defined the dungeon crawling genre and was the inspiration for many titles that followed. This is why we call games of this type roguelikes, because they are literally like Rogue!

Procedural generation has been a key element in roguelikes since their conception. This is why I chose the genre to introduce the topic. Together, we will recreate the iconic features that define the genre, and approach procedural generation with a very practical and hands-on approach.