I’d like to continue moving straight through the flow to the setup screen, but there are several pre-requisites we will need to address first. Among them is the creation of a database connection that can be easily consumed by all of our systems. After connecting to the database, there are a few things we can do to make fetching and working with its data a little easier. These will be implemented as extension methods.
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Unofficial Pokemon Board Game – Title Screen
Now it’s time to provide a concrete example of our flow in motion. We will handle the first couple of states, the “Intro” and “Setup – Menu” state. We will show how to display one screen after another, both based on an app event (launch) and based on user input. The Flow Controller handles both cases like a champ.
Unofficial Pokemon Board Game – Flow Control
The application flow determines what happens and when it happens. In nearly all of my previous projects, the flow sort of just emerged as user interactions and app reactions were tied together. However, you may find value in taking the time to create flow charts. Almost like an artist would create some thumbnails before painting, flow charts can provide you a way to quickly rough out the logic you’ll need to implement. If you can make it clear now, it should be clear later too. In addition to being a good diagram to follow during development, a good flow chart can also serve as an excellet piece of documentation for later – one which probably far surpasses the value of code comments.
Unofficial Pokemon Board Game – ECS
There is one last “resource” we need to gather – the data for our database. I saved this for its own step, because I wanted to take a bit more time to explain the “how” and “why” of the layout of the data. It has a certain pattern to it which is based off of something called an “Entity Component System” architecture.
Unofficial Pokemon Board Game – SQLite
If you’ve followed along with me in the past, you have probably seen me use project assets such as prefabs or scriptable objects as a sort of database. While this approach has certain conveniences such as the ability to make edits in the inspector and connect references with other project assets, it has the downside of being a little fragile. In this project I decided to use SQLite as my vessel for storing Pokemon data. While it can only store basic data types, SQLite still has plenty of other strengths to offer.
Unofficial Pokemon Board Game – Intro
I’ve completed another prototype. This is actually a game designed by my oldest son (9 years old) that he created on paper, and I decided to flesh it out for him. The game is a local multi-player game where each player is a Pokemon trainer. As you travel around the board you can have random encounters with wild-pokemon, catch and train them, and eventually test out your skills against a gym. The first player to earn four gym badges wins!
Tactics RPG Music
It’s been almost a year since the last post, but I finally have a reason to revisit this project. Brennan Anderson wrote some amazing music after following along with the Tactics RPG project and was generous enough to share it with the rest of us. Thanks to him, we will go ahead and add a follow-up post that describes working with music.
Partial Class State Machine
You’ve probably been told before not to re-invent the wheel, but when it comes to my own code I couldn’t disagree more. I love re-inventing the wheel because it helps you understand why things are designed the way they are, and occasionally allows you to make something better. I’m currently “thinking out loud” about a whole new approach to the way I implement state machines that can provide functionality I had been wanting but not thought was possible – until now.
Turn Based Multiplayer – Part 5
We’re on the home stretch for this mini-project! It’s finally time to modify the Game Controller so that input is dependent on the players joined in our match, and to make sure that moves made by one player are seen by the other.
Turn Based Multiplayer – Part 4
Networking in Unity is a large and probably confusing topic, so this lesson is designed to help introduce some of the basic requirements that will be needed to complete our muliplayer game. We will create a few specialized assets and scripts and make use of new classes and tags you may not have seen before. By the time we are done, you should understand how to get two players joined in a match, as well as determine who is who.