How we'll implement procedural generation

At the very start of the book I gave a brief overview of each chapter and what we will be covering in it. Now that we've covered what procedural generation is, let's take a look specifically at some of the ways in which we'll be implementing it as we work towards creating our own roguelike game. This list is not exhaustive.

Populating environments

When we load the game for the first time our objects will be in fixed locations. We're going to start our efforts by fixing this, implementing what we've learned in this chapter about random number generation to spawn our objects at random locations.

At the end of this chapter there are a few optional exercises that include generating numbers within a collection of different ranges. I suggest completing them if you're not comfortable with it already, as we'll be relying on it to achieve this.

Creating unique game objects

One of my personal favorite aspects of procedural generation is the creation of unique objects and items. Knowing that there is a wide variety of items in a game is awesome. Knowing that the items don't even exist yet, and that the possibilities are limitless, is even better!

We'll start simply by initializing our object's member variables randomly, and move up to giving our objects unique sprites and properties. We'll also look at creating dynamic classes that can create highly unique objects from a single base class.