Chapter 6. Procedurally Generating Art
A game's art is one of its defining features. It's usually what first attracts us, and it is one of the driving forces behind keeping us hooked; great aesthetics go a long way. Given that, we want to ensure that this is an area that is as rich, diverse, and immersive as possible.
However, art is financially expensive and time-consuming to produce. Not only that, it's also expensive at the hardware level! Game textures can hit 4K in size, and creating a thousand 4K textures and storing them on traditional game media is no easy task. Thankfully, a wide range of procedural generation techniques can be employed when creating art to help combat some of these issues.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- How procedural generation is used with art
- The benefits and drawbacks of procedurally generated art
- Using SFML sprite modifiers
- Saving modified sprites
- Programmatically creating sprites
