2D Coin collecting game help

Unity Engine
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Hello all, I am a student pursing a degree in Multimedia and Game Development and this is my first time posting on this forum. I’ve worked in Unity now for a bit and have taken a few classes in Unity so far and I am currently adding to a project over my winter break that I did during the fall semester. Basically it’s a simple 2D game where you move around, avoid enemies and collect capsules(Coins).

I have the code and functions and everything for the score counter, and to collect the coins. Everything works just fine. However I have one issue where I have 2 separate scripts for my score counter, and the actual collecting of the game objects themselves. Is there a way to make these 2 scripts reference each other so my score isn’t just displayed as 0, and rather is the number of coins I have collected?

If you look here in my screenshots I have 2 screenshots of the 2 functioning scripts that I have so far. And a scene view screenshot showing in my debug log that the player is collecting the coins. I just need my score counter to display that number of collected coins.

Any help is greatly appreciated! I’m sure it’s a simple fix that I’m just unaware of lol

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Do you have an element that serves as a GameManager? Don’t base the game flow on hundreds of objects, but refer to one place where you change points and read points from. GameManager is made in singleton pattern mostly. So all game objects and scripts can reach it and you don’t have to connect them.

Example:

  • Create GameManager singleton.
  • If player score, add counter in GameManager instance.
  • Update score on board reading from GameManager instance counter.

Don’t force things together, if something is supposed to detect collisions, that’s its role. If something is supposed to refresh the result, this is its role. Components should be small and specific.

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This is just called debugging, whereby you investigate your error and fix it. Here’s how to get started:

You must find a way to get the information you need in order to reason about what the problem is.

Once you understand what the problem is, you may begin to reason about a solution to the problem.

What is often happening in these cases is one of the following:

  • the code you think is executing is not actually executing at all
  • the code is executing far EARLIER or LATER than you think
  • the code is executing far LESS OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing far MORE OFTEN than you think
  • the code is executing on another GameObject than you think it is
  • you’re getting an error or warning and you haven’t noticed it in the console window

To help gain more insight into your problem, I recommend liberally sprinkling Debug.Log() statements through your code to display information in realtime.

Doing this should help you answer these types of questions:

  • is this code even running? which parts are running? how often does it run? what order does it run in?
  • what are the values of the variables involved? Are they initialized? Are the values reasonable?
  • are you meeting ALL the requirements to receive callbacks such as triggers / colliders (review the documentation)

Knowing this information will help you reason about the behavior you are seeing.

You can also supply a second argument to Debug.Log() and when you click the message, it will highlight the object in scene, such as Debug.Log("Problem!",this);

If your problem would benefit from in-scene or in-game visualization, Debug.DrawRay() or Debug.DrawLine() can help you visualize things like rays (used in raycasting) or distances.

You can also call Debug.Break() to pause the Editor when certain interesting pieces of code run, and then study the scene manually, looking for all the parts, where they are, what scripts are on them, etc.

You can also call GameObject.CreatePrimitive() to emplace debug-marker-ish objects in the scene at runtime.

You could also just display various important quantities in UI Text elements to watch them change as you play the game.

If you are running a mobile device you can also view the console output. Google for how on your particular mobile target, such as this answer or iOS: https://discussions.unity.com/t/700551 or this answer for Android: https://discussions.unity.com/t/699654

If you are working in VR, it might be useful to make your on onscreen log output, or integrate one from the asset store, so you can see what is happening as you operate your software.

Another useful approach is to temporarily strip out everything besides what is necessary to prove your issue. This can simplify and isolate compounding effects of other items in your scene or prefab.

Here’s an example of putting in a laser-focused Debug.Log() and how that can save you a TON of time wallowing around speculating what might be going wrong:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/839300/3

When in doubt, print it out!™

Note: the print() function is an alias for Debug.Log() provided by the MonoBehaviour class.

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