Loot Generator

Mouse to click and drag

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Initially, I set out to try my hand at a procedurally generated loot system inspired by Borderlands. I ran into a lot of issues along the way -- mostly dealing with content creation. This project was more focused on learning how to implement such a system and not a game surrounding the system so my content lacked a good theme, is dry and uninteresting as it is currently presented. Additionally I had to create all the sprites for each item which took a lot of time but did not really have anything to do with the generation system itself. The amount of work that it took to handcraft each of the individual elements made me think about design questions like whether a procedurally generated loot system would actually add enough to the game to justify it over hand-crafted content.

This ended up being more of a case study in the Unity UI system and data driven development as pretty much everything is based off of a spreadsheet which, when parsed, loads all the potential items in and sorts them into their proper lists. From that point, the generation is just picking from the different lists based on rng rolls.

What I learned from this project:

• Even in procedurally generated systems, a great deal relies on hand crafted content/theme/art/etc.
• The choice to use procedural generation needs to be well thought out and just putting it into a game does not automatically make any system more interesting.
• How to navigate the Unity UI system in a more in-depth way
• How to load, parse, and make use of external data