Programming Challenges

Without doubt and maybe not for the better my focus has shifted from working on my game every night to trying to edit a video. Work on the game continues just slower than before… My fledgling YouTube channel continues to grow albeit at a limited pace. I’ve seemly snatched the “Bolt” niche on YouTube for the time being, but that’s a limited population and is likely to stay that way.

It’s time for something new.

With one part “hey this is cool” and one part “maybe this will expand my audience” I’ve launched Programming Challenges that can be completed in any programming environment or language used in Unity. This is something that I did with my students this year to help get over the significant learning curve of Bolt - and by most accounts it really helped. So why not bring it to a larger audience? If nothing else maybe it’ll help me refine my the challenges for my students.

The goal is to give short programming challenges that can be done in an evening or certainly without a huge time commitment over a weekend. The target audience is beginner to intermediate programmers and likely folks who are picking up Unity as a hobby and want to learn more.

But isn’t that what game jams are for?

For sure! But a lot of us can’t devote huge hours to a game jam on any sort of regular basis. And for those at the beginning of their game development journey creating an entire game (even in a month) can be intimidating.

Now I’m quite sure that there will never be the “perfect” challenge. Some will find a challenge far too hard or so easy that it’s not worth the time to fire up Unity. All the same this seems like a niche that is unfilled on the greater interwebs and continues the larger goal of giving back to the community that I learned from.

With that said, this last weekend, I launched the first challenge. The challenge is to create a dynamic grid of objects. It’s not a game and its not intended to be, but the programming used to “solve” this challenge is something that could easily be used in a game.

I’d love to hear feedback on the idea or this particular challenge. If you’ve got a suggestion for a challenge I want to hear that too.

Resources: Processing, Consumption and Inventory

As a solo developer (of an admittedly over scoped game) relying on outside assets is a key to building a game "quickly" and efficiently. I'm not the type of person to subscribe to the idea that I need to build everything from scratch. I have no desire to build my own game engine, but I do understand why folks often prefer to roll their own solution.

I've become very skeptical of assets that run with the game. I have learned that editor tools are more reliable and don't come with performance downsides that many runtime assets do. I've tried using several assets that are overly bloated or have turned out to have poor performance. My snow shader and graphing tool came out of such experiences. It's a tricky to find the balance between using pre-made tools and rolling your own. There are pro's and con's both ways.

Game #2 will allow players to collect and use items - this will in fact be a key mechanic. This means that I need some kind of inventory solution. I did a little research on how to do the basics, but decided to also look at solutions on the Unity Asset Store. If nothing else the Asset Store can be a good source of ideas. 

As a Unity Plus subscriber I get discounts on a handful of assets. One of those assets is Inventory Pro. So I figured it was worth a look since I was shopping for a inventory solution and the reviews were nearly flawless. 

I watched the tutorials and did as much research as I could. While not "cheap" it's an asset that would take me several days if not weeks to reproduce even in the most basic of forms. Plus it has a level of polish that would take even more work on my part.  So why not give it a shot?

I made the purchase and spent some time playing around. My first impression was positive. It has a nice and easy to use editor. Out of the box it handles person inventory, vendors, looting, banks, a skill bar and two styles of crafting. It comes with a pretty decent default look too (but, I suspect almost any developer will want to modify it). What's not to like about it?

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Inventory Pro Editor - Item Editor

Inventory Pro also plays nice with several other popular third party add-ons. This includes Playmaker for those who don't want to dink around in C#. 

It also has custom functions for Behavior Designer which is a major plus in my book as I intend to use Behavior Designer as my AI engine. 

If you are intending on building game with a fairly typical or standard use of inventory then Inventory Pro should be on your short list of assets to check out. However, if your design has some non-standard uses you should keep reading. 

The Other Side of the Coin

As I continued to explore and think more about the custom needs my game was going to have I was becoming discouraged. The code base is all open source, which is greatly appreciated, but it feels like a mess of inherited classes and prefabs. Ugh. The documentation is decent, but doesn't do a great job of describing how to truly customize the tools. The learning curve is moderately steep.

The odd blog post by the developer were very helpful and cut hours out of my work. The needed info is out there, but it can be a little hard to find. 

When trying to setup a scene you can't simply drag and drop UI prefabs in the scene. They don't easily slide into a scene because there are too many connections that need to be made. Too many prefabs that need to be dropped into the inspector or combination of components that are required. It's certainly possible, but it's not easy.  Adding the UI to a scene is best done by copying from a demo scene and then turning off the parts you don't need - a custom editor to add the parts you want and get them all connected correctly would be a major plus and make the product that much more user friendly. 

There is a cost to using someone else's code base... That shouldn't be a real surprise. I got frustrated enough with Inventory Pro that I spent a few hours working to roll my own custom inventory code. It was all going well until I began to write a custom editor to create content. I went running back to Inventory Pro and I'm very glad I did.

Custom Windows

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I mentioned a chicken, so why not include a image of my chicken?

For Game #2 I need some custom windows for resource consumers and resource processors. A resource consumer could be something such as a steam engine from my previous post that may take in wood or coal and produce a more usable form of energy.  While resource processors may be something such as a windmill that will process corn into corn meal that can be used to feed your chickens, i.e. turn items into other items.

Each of these custom windows is easy enough to create from a purely UI perspective, but coding them took a bit more especially as I was to digging through someone else's code. 

A resource consumer is very similar to a vendor in that individual objects in a scene will have there own collection that is loaded into a common UI. The main differences being that the resource consumer needs to do something with the items even when the player is not currently using that object, i.e. a steam engine should continue to burn coal and produce energy when the player is busy elsewhere and I don't want to be selling coal to a steam engine...

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A snippet of the some of the custom code - All in all there's several hundred lines in the new classes some is copied other bits are mine

Rather than inherit from the vendor classes, which would bring functionality I didn't want, I chose to essentially copy the vendor scripts (ItemCollection and Trigger) and modify the scripts once I had basic functionality working.  The result was a custom trigger script, custom UI window (damned ugly at the moment), a custom collection script that controls what is shown in the UI as well as a base class resource consumer that is designed to be extended for a variety of resource consumer objects (steam engine, chicken feeder, etc). 

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I promise it won't be this ugly in a final build

The resource processor is a bit different. At its core resource processing is very similar to crafting. Items go in and products come out - all following a blueprint. Given that Inventory Pro has a built in crafting system it seemed worth the time to fight through the code to create a custom "crafting" window that would meet my design needs. 

The idea here is a that a player (or NPC) drops off some items to be processed and it gets turned into a different item that can later be collected. This means that the UI needs to have an input and a output collection/inventory. It's also required that each individual scene object has it's own input and output collections to that get loaded to the UI when the player interacts with the object. A final two requirements is that the resource processor continues to work when the UI is closed and that the products get assigned to the correct scene object when the processing is done so the product doesn't get lost and the player can collect it later.

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A snippet of the Custom Trigger

This last requirement was the biggest hurdles and required about an hour of hunting through code to follow the flow of the information. Inventory Pro has a "craft info" class that contains all the basic information which gets passed through about 8 different methods before an new inventory object is actually created.

I almost lost it at this point. Lots of deep breaths needed. 

To get it all working required an addition to the CraftInfo class to track what object had ordered the product to be created. This allows a finished product to look up where it was supposed to go and assign it to the appropriate collection. 

Custom Inventory Items

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Default Item Types - Plus 3 of My own

While I found the process of adding custom windows and functionality challenging and frustrating, adding custom inventory item types was easy and almost fun. Out of the box Inventory Pro comes with several default item types, but anything beyond the typical RPG will likely require custom item types.

Different types have different properties (oh, shocking). These properties are not particularly well documented or at least I haven't found the documentation. Thankfully most are self explanatory. 

Game #2 is not the typical RPG with the collection, crafting or upgrading of gear playing a central role. Rather most inventory will have some use in creating something in the world. This might be a shovel that is used to prepare the ground to plant a crop or coal that will be used by a steam engine to power an industrial building. Inventory Pro's items all inherit from a parent class that calls a Use() function. This function can easily be overridden to perform any actions needed. The Use() function is called when the player uses the object. Which can be done from inside the inventory or from the skill bar.

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A sample custom USE() function for a tool item type.

The Use() function returns an integer that indicates whether the object can be used.

In the case shown using the tool will call an outside public function that toggles a mode of the game (i.e. use a shovel and you can dig to plant seeds). 

The inventory item can also have public variables that will be displayed in the Inventory Pro editor. For example the Tool Type enum can be set for each inventory item of this type inside the editor which makes for easy and organized content creation. 

The ease of creating custom inventory items was a stark contrast to making custom windows and triggers. Why can't the rest be this easy?

The Final Verdict - Inventory Pro

Inventory Pro caused me a good amount frustration, plenty of swearing but also gave me a much more functional inventory system than I could have created on my own.

If you are looking to build a game with non-standard use of inventory and aren't comfortable with C# then you should probably look else where or be willing to hire a programmer to code up some custom solutions. 

But if you don't need custom functionality or if you are comfortable with C# and reading someone else's code then Inventory Pro can solve your inventory needs far quicker than you'll be able to roll your own solution. Mucking around with the custom windows wasn't particularly fun, but the end product was worth the time and money.

Click to Color

I was needing something simple to work on (the day job has turned my brain to mush) so I spent a few hours last week polishing a tool that I've used in the production of Fracture the Flag. The tool allows the creation and editing of color palettes within Unity.

Low poly scene and the 

Click To Color

interface

The use of color palettes along with flat shaded low poly assets allows a significant reduction in the number of materials being used in a scene or project. This can also reduce draw calls and improve performance.

Due to the flat shading models can be unwrapped and the UV's can be stacked. This allows the texture size to be very small - in theory as small as one pixel per color used in the project! This means that by using a 32 by 32 pixel texture a project can have up to 1024 colors contained in a 4 kb file! Ideal for mobile uses or simply keeping a desktop build size down to something reasonable.

Unwrapped model in Blender

The editing of these textures within Unity also allows the artist or developer to quickly adjust colors of models in a scene while lighting and image effects are shown in real time. This speeds up development time as there is less back and forth between Unity and a photo editing program.

Click To Color will be available on the Unity Asset Store:  https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/72930

All the features of Click to Color can be seen in the video below.

A potential work flow using Unity and Blender is shown in the second video.