Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Going procedural
If you are the bold or adventurous sort, another route to flesh out your world is to proced-
urally generate it. What you usually see when you look for procedural generation in Unity
are dungeon generators. In fact, some of the best examples I've seen out there involve ran-
domly generated dungeons where every run of the game is different from the last. Other
examples are usually found in endless running games where a style of procedural selec-
tion is done to choose the next running area or to put random scene items in.
When we try to apply this to RPG games, we want to balance the fixed part of the world/
story we are looking to convey with a more random placement of towns/villages or places
of interest. This will make the world we see different for every player but still convey the
background of the theme.
Now, the whole subject of procedural generation is far too large to go into for this topic,
but I can give you a few points for where to look.
The best place to start is the
Procedural Content Generation Wiki
available at
ht-
tp://pcg.wikidot.com/
;
it's the go-to place to start learning the following general tech-
niques:
•
Iterated function systems
: These are fractals to create land masses or structured
areas
•
L-systems
: These are used for roads or path generation
•
Diamond-square and midpoint displacement algorithms
: These are used to
create random height terrains
•
Perlin and simplex noise system
s: These are used to add further randomness to
the generation
Reddit.com
is also a great place for examples, questions, and queries on procedural gener-
ation. Two of the best reddits are as follows:
•
http://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration
(this is the main procedural genera-
tion reddit. Although it's mostly promotional these days, there are still a lot of
older posts with samples and information. It's also a good place to start with ques-
tions.)
•
http://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding
(this is a good source of information for
this section on maps for your game. It is mainly related to D&D, but it does con-
tain a lot of useful information.)
