Don't Turn... #4

Debug Buttons

This week, my main goal was to improve the workflow when testing features by adding in cheats. My first thought was to add a custom editor script onto the player so we could trigger the cheats from the inspector on the player.

I had done something similar for the enemies themselves so they could be respawned at the click of a button using the unity documentation on custom editors (Unity Technologies, Version 2021.3), and the unity documentation on GUI Layout code(Unity Technologies, Version 2021.3), to create the buttons.

Custom enemy editor script made in previous weeks

However I decided against this for two main reasons.

Adding another script onto the player would clog up the inspector and make it look messier than it already is.
Some of the cheats I planned on implementing also interacted with the enemies in the game, so having it on the player did not seem like the best option.

Instead I opted to create a custom editor Window, that could be opened in the same way the inspector/hierarchy is opened. I used the unity documentation on editor windows(Unity Technologies, Version 2021.3) as reference on how to initially set one up and then from there I used the GUI layout buttons the same way as the enemy editor script.

I added three debug buttons:

God Mode - which disabled player collision, allowed free movement vertically and horizontally and also increased the players move speed.
Unlock All Abilities- In the name, triggers all unlock ability methods on NPCs.
Respawn All Enemies - finds all enemy objects and triggers the respawn method.

The respawn gave me a bit of grief as when enemies are killed in the game, they are set to inactive however normally find objects of type only locates active objects. So after some online searching I came across a thread detailing how to locate inactive game objects. (Find an Inactive Game Object - Unity Answers, 2015). This worked for this particular task however, some in the thread did warn that this is not a good way of performing this task as any changes made with the resultant array may also affect prefabs of said object. Luckily for this code, there would be no issue as the changed variables are being set back to their default anyway.

However if I get time I would like to go back and alter this way of respawning the enemies, possibly by putting all enemies as a child of an empty game object and using get component in children to get references to the scripts.

Knockback

The goal of this task was to implement some feedback when the player or an enemy is hit with an attack.

The commented out code in green was the first version of the knockback code, which worked for enemies but did not produce the movement I wanted when the player took this knockback, as applying a force to the rigid body also had to overcome the gravity in order to lift off the ground. Instead I opted to directly changing the velocity of the object taking knockback, which produced a better knockback.

Checkpoint Heal no longer every frame

In the first version of the checkpoint code, the player setting their spawn and saving the game was linked to:

OnTriggerStay2D

which is called every frame that a collider is inside that area, causing a large amount of unnecessary saving. So first I swapped it out for:

OnTriggerEnter2D

Which is only called once when the collider first enters the area. This means that the game is only save once when the player enters the area.

Now, healing the player only triggers once so I had to change that by checking if the players health or curse bar was not full and if it isn't full, then trigger healing again.

Checkpoints continue to heal after leaving area

One of the bugs caused by continually healing the player if they were not full, is that when they left the area before being fully healed, it would continue until they were full. This only needed a simple change of a public Boolean that is changed when the player is inside the area and can only heal if that Boolean is true.

References

Technologies, U. (n.d.-a). Unity - Manual: Custom Editors. Retrieved 6 April 2023, from https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/editor-CustomEditors.html

Technologies, U. (n.d.-c). Unity - Scripting API: GUILayout. Retrieved 6 April 2023, from https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/GUILayout.html

Technologies, U. (n.d.-b). Unity - Manual: Editor Windows. Retrieved 6 April 2023, from https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/editor-EditorWindows.html

Find an inactive game object—Unity Answers. (2015, February 1). https://answers.unity.com/questions/890636/find-an-inactive-game-object.html