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

Audio manipulation


As with graphics, SFML offers a number of functions that allow us to modify sounds. Therefore, we'll use these to alter the pitch and volume of our sound effects to create variance. We'll then use advanced functions to create 3D spatialized sound, bringing depth to the scene through our audio.

Behavior and mechanics

It's not just the static items and resources that can be generated procedurally. To add more variance to our gameplay, we'll use some procedural techniques to create dynamic gameplay mechanics. Specifically, we'll create a system that will generate a random goal for the player, and present them with a random reward should that goal be achieved.

We'll also give our enemies some basic Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the form of A Star (A*)pathfinding, allowing them to chase a player through the level.

Dungeon generation

Towards the end of the book, once we're comfortable using Random Number Generator (RNG) with procedural systems, and with our game project, we are going to implement the defining feature of roguelikes; randomly generated dungeons.

I've mentioned a few times that procedural generation can be used to create theoretically never-ending game worlds. So, we're going to do just that. We'll implement a system where every room that we visit is generated randomly, and we'll give each floor a distinct feel using the graphics manipulation techniques we'll learn in later chapters.