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

Procedurally generated level goals


The final system that we're going to build in this chapter is one that will generate randomized level goals. In each level, we have to find the key, find the exit, and kill all enemies that get in our way. Let's add more gameplay and challenge by adding random goals that the player can also complete. Every time a level is entered, we'll potentially give the player an optional task that, if completed, will yield a random reward.

The variable and function declarations

The first step in creating this system is to declare the variables and functions that we're going to need. We'll encapsulate the behavior to generate a goal in its own function. For starters, we need to declare the following private function in Game.h:

private:
/**
 * Generates a level goal.
 */
void GenerateLevelGoal();

Given the type of goals that we want to generate (killing enemies, collecting gold, and collecting gems), we need variables to hold these values. Let's also declare the following...