How procedural generation is used with art

Game art is a great candidate for procedural generation. It's expensive to create manually, both in terms of developer investment and on a hardware level, and is open to be manipulated programmatically. However, like everything, it has a range of benefits and drawbacks. So, let's take a look at them before we get started.

Using sprite effects and modifiers

Perhaps the simplest way in which procedural generation can be used with game art is through the manipulation of existing sprites and models using built-in functions. For example, most game engines and frameworks will offer some functionality to edit graphics, such as the color, alpha, and scale modifiers.

Combining these functions with Random Number Generator (RNG) is an easy and quick way to start producing randomized game art. For example, Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) offers the functionality to change both the color and size of a sprite. Even if we just use these functions, we can...