Post by Sirius Bizdness in What was the hackiest thing you did during the game jam?

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My game was meant to have five characters, each of which has a unique ability. Not only did I decide to completely skip one ability so I'd have time to build actual levels, but I also couldn't think of anything to do with the replacement ability (which another character shared). Consequently, the game features two entire characters who only appear in the first, final, and semifinal levels, none of which make use of character abilities at all~

On the note of the semifinal and final levels: the entire first day was spent trying to build a completely different game out of magnificently incoherent mechanics. Most of the levels were built on the second day, after completely replacing the core mechanics, but I decided to tack on levels 1 and 2 from the original game at the end, just to avoid having to make a proper ending screen.

https://sirius-bizdness.itch.io/one-by-one

Crime Dog5 years ago

Oof! A core mechanics change late in the game is brutal, that must have been rough.

Sirius Bizdness5 years ago (1 edit)

Honestly, I thought it would be, but it turns out that most of the supplemental mechanics didn't actually rely on any core mechanics beyond "character can move into this space when s/he wasn't before." UnityEvent is a beautiful thing, and I have absolutely been underutilizing it.

...Then again, I stayed up until about 5 in the morning struggling to add in the softball throwing, build out all the character abilities, and make enough levels to properly utilize at least three of the characters, so yeah, there was definitely a drawback to it :)

Huh. I said "completely different," didn't I....

Crime Dog5 years ago

I haven't actually tried using UnityEvent yet, does it work OK out of the box or do you have to modify it a lot to get it do what you want vs. rolling with your own event system?

Sirius Bizdness5 years ago (2 edits)

I've never used another event system, actually. Just so we're on the same page, what exactly is an event system in your book?

It works fine, I believe--I didn't have trouble with it for a small-scale game like this--but there are copious replacements out there to fix problems, and I know several caveats have stopped me before:

Callbacks don't run in a particular order, and in fact may be outright non-deterministic.
Methods to call must be public void. No idea if this is standard; all I know is, it's tripped me up at least twice.
To pass multiple parameters, or even a single parameter if it's not static in the editor, you have to create a class which inherits from UnityEvent<T0...T3> and use that for your UnityEvent field. To make it accept parameters when you Invoke() it, you have to explicitly select the dynamic variant from the dropdown menu.
Oh yeah also you get four parameters max, but I've never run up against that barrier (but I've also never used UnityEvent to link together whole gameplay systems before).

Again, I've no idea what other event systems are like--all I know is, UnityEvent lets me use the editor to connect systems~

Crime Dog5 years ago

Pretty much just any system where you push out events, and they get picked up by any listeners subscribed to listen for those events.

Definitely sounds like it's worth me having a look at though, it would be nice to not have to make my own on projects if Unity has one that's robust.

Glad it worked for you!

Sirius Bizdness5 years ago

Ah, okay, simple enough.

With UnityEvent, you can add listeners from the editor, complete with up to (I think) one static, unchangeable-at-runtime parameter. I've no idea if that's common (it is among replacements), but I know I love it to death~

(Actually, it's the very same thing the GUI system uses for buttons and the like. Maybe you knew that already....)