In this post we will begin the first real step of the project as we create the game screen – this will consist of a simple text field for user input and a scrollable text view showing the history of messages throughout the game. I will go in-depth on the description of code for the view controller as well as the manager object that records the message history. When we complete this lesson, you should be able to type messages into the text field and see them get appended to the log of messages in the text view.
Intermediate
Zork – Intro
I have recently needed to learn Swift at work, so I decided to come up with a new game project to help inspire me. Since I am not using Unity, I wanted something light on art and I decided to look at old text based adventure games, like Zork, and found that it actually held quite a few interesting challenges. Simultaneously I have been intrigued by an architecture pattern called Entity Component System (ECS) which I have really wanted to dabble with for awhile now. Although I am new to both Swift and the ECS pattern, I feel that the results are worth sharing!
Sorted Shop
One reader recently asked “how to make a shop that is capable of sorting items by various fields like cost, atk dmg, lvl requirement etc.”, so I decided to take a small detour and go ahead and provide a solution. In this lesson we will generate, view, sort, and buy items from a user interface.
Object Pooling
Object pooling is a relatively common practice in games. By reusing your GameObjects instead of destroying and recreating them you can save precious CPU cycles. It is easy to find a lot of free scripts and tutorials on the subject – even Unity has provided one in a Live Training session. Their presentation, while a great introduction, was not what I would consider production ready. In this post I’ll share my thoughts on their implementation as well as how I would improve upon it.
Intro to Source Control
Today I would like to talk about something which isn’t actually programming, but which every programmer should know – source control (also known as version or revision control). You will see this topic listed on most job listings as something you should be familiar with, but many hobbyists go far too long (sometimes waiting until getting hired into a big company) before realizing its many benefits. Source control can be extremely valuable even if you work solo on a project! Continue reading
Social Scripting Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we discussed several means by which Unity allows you to get your scripts talking back and forth between each other. That included direct references, their legacy and new message system, and their new event system as well.
In this post we will examine the options available to you as a language feature of C#, just in case you don’t want to rely on the options Unity provided. Although their event system is quite powerful and easy to use, keeping your events native will allow your code to be more easily reused in other projects or ported to other engines. I consider this part of the series intermediate level, and will expect you to have a working knowledge of C#. Continue reading