Project 3 - Scripts
Project 3 was daunting from the get go for me as our team was made up of two designers and no programmer. I knew for the outset that I would struggle to produce some meaningful scripting and wanted to make the game as simply as possible. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, my teammate was adamant that we use the Unity Event systems instead of the Physics systems. As spoken about in my Pivot blog i was able to make a prototype of a physics version overnight whereas it took two weeks to get any actual gameplay into the events driven game. I had previously worked with Unity Events back in GAM111 for my turn based tactical dodge ball game “DodgeBrawl”, but it was clear i hadn’t used them to the extent my teammate had nor to the level of sophistication expected. I did write all my own code for the physics version of the game and also some code for an early version of the menu system (which also wasn’t used).
Let's start with the menu scripting, although you can do almost everything you need for a menu inside unity, i wanted to use C# code to navigate the three different panels i had set up. The first and main panel would hold the game's title and give the player the ability to move between through buttons. The button on the left would navigate towards the left panel showing the level selection screens which would also contain a button taking you back to the main screen and similarly the button to the right sent you to the right hand panel displaying the game's credits. Although this could have been achieved through unity animations I decided to use specific code to produce the effect because I thought i would have more control over how it would look. I set my desired menu positions of each panel using the desired aspect ratio we were going for. I then set the left and right equivalents and on my button scripts for OnPlayClick and OnBackClick i used NavigateTo to move to the desired panel.
Next up will be the two scripts i wrote for the physics version of Lock n Loaf, one BreadScript which controlled the bread homing in on each other and also checking tags to see if the bread was colliding with an ingredient and if so it would destroy it. Controlling the bread homing in on itself was a simple IF statement which checked if the bread was in motion, took each breads transform positions and then translated them towards each other. When the bread had collided with ingredients the script also took in what calorie and nutrition levels each ingredient held. The variable of Nutrition and Calories were in my GameManager Script, i set the variables in the GameManager script and was able to set the exact values in unity on each of the ingredient prefabs. The GameManager script also handed the spawning of the bread, the script would check whether or not bread was currently located on in the game and if not it was spawn them in their designated spawn locations. The GameManager script was also where i dictated which bread prefab was left and which was right so that the code in the BreadScript could send them towards each other.
I also worked on a preliminary version of our CSV parser, it ended up being changed in the final product but the basis which i had written was iterated upon not completely removed. The scripts purpose was to read our CSV sheets which indicated what ingredients would spawn in certain parts of a 5 X 5 grid. This script sets up that grid and then takes in a Legend of A being our avocado prefab and T being our tomato prefab and so on. It also used the WE from our legend to denote a waves end. This was so we could have one sheet per level with seven sets of 5 x 5 grids in it. What i had written however wasn’t a function which was able to be called in the event system. When the game ran it would immediately spawn ingredients on the screen instead of waiting for a dictated wave to be called. This was iterated upon and was how we were able to get the wave spawning in the game.
