I am new to blogging (less than a year) and I don’t really have a good way to gauge success, but…
I’ve passed 25,000 views! Whoo hoo! I am very excited and have been having a lot of fun. Thanks everyone for sticking with me and for all the great comments!
I feel like now would be a good time to take a step back and ask how I’m doing. Are you enjoying the tutorials and project idea? Any suggestions for improvement or comments for the future?
Thanks!
In this lesson we will show how to define a variety of jobs and store their data as a project asset. Although we have done this before (with conversation assets), this time we will be creating prefabs programmatically. By choosing prefabs over scriptable objects, we have the ability to take advantage of components such as the features which we introduced in the previous lesson.
Now that we have stats, we will need new ways to modify them. Of course one way is through leveling up your character, but a potentially more fun way is by items. Equiping a sword which is not only cool looking but provides a great bonus to your ATK (attack) stat can be very rewarding. Likewise, when you are damaged in battle a health potion might be in order to boost your HP (hit points) stat. In this lesson we will examine a few ways to create items, both consumable and equippable, as well as how to manage your equipment.
In this lesson we will begin adding Stats to our game. Experience and Level are particularly important stats, so we will begin by focusing on those and show how we might distribute experience between heroes in a party. As enough experience is gained, the level of the hero can also be incremented. Along the way I will also address how one system might create an exception-to-the-rule in another system and offer a solution on how to allow them to interract while keeping things as decoupled as possible.
In this post I will present my own implementation of a component-based architecture which closely mimics Unity’s implementation. It really isn’t as hard as one might think. Why would I ever do such a thing? I think I have plenty of good reasons, but I’ll let you decide whether or not its all worth it. As always, feel free to critique!
In this post we will continue to flesh out the UI by adding the Ability Menu. This menu will allow the user to determine what phase of a turn is active- such as moving, attacking, etc. as well as what to do during a turn- such as what kind of skill to use during an attack. We will actually implement the menu where possible (Move), and anything we haven’t gotten to yet will use placeholder content (Attack, Magic etc). We will also see how to support canceling a move and be able to restore an earlier state.
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.
This week we will implement the UI components from the previous lesson in a Conversation UI element which would appear as part of a cut-scene before and/or after battles. The panels will hold a little bit of text along with a sprite showing who is speaking. A bouncing arrow will indicate when there is more to read and using the input “Fire” event will cause the conversation to move on to the next message or the next character who will speak, etc. These panels can appear in any corner of the screen (which could indicate the direction of a speaking character relative to the player), and will animate in and out of the screen as needed.
The user interface (UI) is one of those areas you always end up spending a lot of time implementing, and every game needs one in some form or fashion. I have built up a variety of reusable libraries in the past, but with Unity’s new UI tools I find myself starting over again. If you’re like me, the anchor and pivot system provided by a RectTransform may have been a bit confusing. I like working with it pretty well in the inspector, because I can modify the anchors and pivot to any corner for easy placement. In code, it wasn’t quite as easy, so this lesson is dedicated to the creation of a few reusable components which will, hopefully, make all our lives easier for awhile.
I’ve received some feedback regarding using event-based architecture in my recent post on my Tactics RPG State Machine. The concern is that because events cause extra memory allocations it could have an affect on performance. I’ve used events heavily in every project I’ve worked on and to date have never observed a performance problem on their account. Still, I was curious to run some tests and see just how bad it might be.