A Zoo for NPCs

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From the course by Unity

Rapid Gameplay Prototyping

27 ratings

Unity

Rapid Gameplay Prototyping

27 ratings

Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Unity Expert Gameplay Programmer Certification Preparation

Welcome to Rapid Gameplay Prototyping, the first course in Unity's Gameplay Programming Specialization! This course is exam preparation for Unity's Expert Gameplay Programmer Certification Exam. This course will challenge you with a series of realistic programming problems in Unity video-game projects, inspired by one or more of the topics covered in the Expert Gameplay Programmer Exam. Throughout this course, you will work on a 2D “infinite platformer” game project. This will help you practice prototyping core game play mechanics, including scripting GameObjects and their components, coordinating UI systems, and implementing UI scripting. You will also identify conflicts and implement solutions during the prototype stage. This is an advanced-level course, intended for industry game developers or very experienced Unity enthusiasts who are looking to “level-up” their gameplay programming and implementation strategies. To succeed in this courses, you should have at least 2-3 years of experience developing games with Unity. You should be familiar with the full-game lifecycle (working from early concept to launch), creating and working with Prefabs, understanding game asset and animation pipelines, and have some experience with Unity Services. You should also have advanced programming skills, particularly in the C# language.

From the lesson

Core Gameplay Prototyping

For the first week of this course, you’ll get practice in identifying and configuring the required Components and key features for a game prototype from an analysis of a Game Design Document. You’ll develop the technical design for basic user controls, and behaviors for the player’s character and the NPCs, and then implement them.

Getting the Basics Set Up For the Most Basic NPC7:42

Inheritance and Polymorphism5:48

A Zoo for NPCs3:59

Meet the Instructors

Unity Technologies
Dustin Carroll
Senior Technical Artist & Adjunct Instructor
Computing & Digital Media

Alright, hopefully that wasn't too difficult,

and you've now had a Walker enemy walking along your surfaces.

Hopefully looks something like this.

There is one. There we go.

Alright. We have an enemy walking along

a surface which is one of the things that a Walker must have.

More importantly is not falling off which is

definitely one of the things that should not have.

This is an enemy that's actually going to challenge a player slightly.

There's one issue but it's not actually having to do anything with our enemy.

When our character attempts to jump on it,

we are not squashing this enemy like we should.

However, this is something I'm going to change in my character script,

rather than introduce and to every single one of my enemies.

We've successfully used enemy base class to create

a more complex enemy to challenge or player and that's fantastic,

and we can create another one and another one,

and dozens more based on that base class and get a whole bunch of coding for free.

Well, we also have to introduce our flying enemies to help

our player bridge the chasms that they have to jump over.

An enemy on the ground,

an enemy in the air are going to be behaving in different ways

so it might help us to create an extra layer of abstraction,

further differentiating an enemy into an Air enemy and a Ground enemy.

Each one of those coming from the enemy base class.

The enemy base class will handle health

and what it means to get squashed and add to the player's score.

The ground enemy will incorporate all that and also include

all the mechanics for detecting what is ground and what is a deadly cliff.

Whereas, the air enemy will handle flight stuff,

handling gravity and making sure it doesn't fall into the abyss or go too high.

By further differentiating these codes,

we will save ourselves more times as we further branch out,

and we also get the ability to tell scripts to only

use an air enemy or only use a ground and enemy and not just any enemy.

This will help to make our code a little safer,

we will definitely be checking to make sure what an enemy type is,

and we'll be saving ourselves time.

And we can go even further than that,

the Walkers are movement, but the Jumpers,

they don't actually move left or right so we might have to

further break it down and this is where we're going

to start designing our zoology of NPCs.

We're going to start at the base class at the top,

split into our ground and air enemies,

and if Steve gets creative one night,

there might be a third enemy, I don't know.

And from there we can break down further and further making

extra layers of what an enemy is and is not.

It's almost like making your own taxonomy of NPCs.

And every time you go up a level,

NPCs get a little bit more similar,

a little bit more similar until you get to the base class

where all enemy share the exact same attributes.

Mapping out your zoology of NPCs is going to help you design them in

the long run by figuring out what shared attributes are necessary at what points,

and where a branch off is required.

When you're done mapping out your zoology of NPCs,

go ahead and start coding out the various NPCs you want in your game.

I'm sticking with the GDD of course,

but it never hurts to experiment a little if you see a good idea.

I know designers are generally very happy to receive improvements on their own genius.

At the end you should have a playable game.

It may not have a lot of feedback and the controls might be a little weird.

It might be a little bit more difficult than you hoped for,

but it's playable and we're on the right direction.

Go ahead. Get your NPCs working and get your game into a playable state.

In the next module, we're going to introduce some user feedback

to help you test the game and make it a bit more fun to play.

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