As I've been trying to get more YouTube content put together more steadily, one of the themes I'm interested in is doing some behind-the-scenes of the role playing game (RPG) I'm making with some friends in Unity3D. I've found that being able to work on an RPG outside of my regular day job is a really awesome way for me to keep up on my technical skills. I love coding, and the further along I move in my career as an engineering manager, the less time I actually spend writing code myself. I pride myself in being a technical engineering manager, so for me working on this RPG is a great outlet for creativity and practice. I mentioned this in my LinkedIn post here:
Persisting Game Objects Across Maps
In this video, I focus on one of the challenges the game was facing due to how objects are materialized onto the playable map. The map that we load from disk to be shown and interacted with in the playable RPG commonly has "templates" and "spawners". Both of these are responsible for creating objects at runtime given some criteria. As a result, uniquely placed game objects appear on the playable map for the player to interact with.
Sounds good then, right? Well the two challenges I focused on addressing were:
- If we leave the map and go to another one, there's no way to persist the player across maps! That means you get a brand new character every time you transition maps. In an RPG, this is definitely not going to work out.
- If we return to an existing map, we expect it to be in the same state as when we were last on it. This means that the objects generated from templates or spawners must remain and NOT be respawned (which would effectively make completely new game objects).
Check out the video below:
Persisting Map Game Objects in a Cache
Next up was actually implementing some of the changes being discussed previously. In order to make this work in our RPG, my goal was to:
- Allow maps to save a lookup of the unique IDs for game objects that were generated
- Save the list of game objects generated into a "cache"
- Upon revisiting a map, tap into the "cache" to reload the existing game objects
One of my mental hurdles with this was acknowledging that we don't yet have a solid serialization foundation for our game. I was thinking I'd want to serialize the game data to something persistent to make this work, but I was also worried writing things to disk would be overkill (and how does this mix with save game concepts?). Instead, I opted for the lightweight approach was "get something working" and I can revisit this later to extend it to persist things to disk if necessary.
Check out the video below:
Which Domain Does This Belong To?
We've been trying to practice Domain Driven Design (DDD) concepts in our game. One pattern I've taken to an extreme is over-separating domains into very granular pieces and the result is that we have HUNDREDS of C# projects. It's overkill, for sure. However, I feel that it's offered some flexibility in having boundaries we can collapse later. My experience so far has told me it's easier to collapse boundaries than it is to split.
This is all and well until we have situations where I need a class that has knowledge of two domains. That's what this next video was about. I talk through acknowledging that I don't know what to do and that I'll move ahead with something best effort. I think the answer to my dilemma is that I need to translate things into a new domain for usage, but it feels like overkill. If you have thoughts on this leave a comment on this post or on the video!
Check out the video below:
Death Animations For All!
Finally, this last update was about something hopefully less boring... Death animations! I worked through how:
- I can extend our reusable sprite animation factory to create a death animation to be reused by ALL our actor sprites
- I can build a system that checks actor life and changes the animation as necessary to death
Unfortunately, I had some hiccups the first time through recording this, but I wanted to code the whole thing live. After a Blue Screen of Death interrupted my first attempt, my second attempt I think worked pretty well! Without much code at all we could get this system fired up and it worked the first time! Well, close. I didn't realize that our animation system already supports an animation that has an "infinite" duration final frame (in this case, the body lying on the tile). This is handled by a null value instead of a set length in seconds. I fixed it right after recording! Overall, I was incredibly happy with the result.
Check out the video below:
You can find the next installment here!