Advice on Setting up Multiple Inventorys and character sheets

Unity Engine
1

Hey all. Looking for some general advice on a question I have.

I’m making a old school, 3D dungeon game (like Black Cyrpt, Dungeon Master, or more recently, Legend of Grimrock). The basic grid movement is sorted, and I’ve been mainly concentrating recently on getting the template GUI down. So at the moment I have an inventory working, a character sheet with multiple tabs (armour, skills, stats, etc). And I’ve just finished up some icons for where the character portraits would go. So i’ve all that working at the moment for one character.

So this is where I’m looking for advice: Multiple characters, each with their character sheets (with different tabs) and inventories.

I’ve fair idea on how I could do it, but wondering what the best way would be. Essentially, I don’t know whether to make 4 individual player objects, and have broadly the same scripts on each, or one big ‘party’ object with all the scripts on it, with each individual inventory or character sheet just spilt up into different functions in the one script.

For those unfamiliar with the type of game, it would be party based, but with a 1st person view, you can’t really control characters individually. You can equip each of them with different stuff, they have separate attacks, etc, but the party moves forward as one at all times. So from a gameplay point of view, I don’t think not having individual objects per character would be a problem.

Anyone ever done something similar to this? I’m straying towards the one big player object with separate functions/classes per character in the one mega script, because I think it will make other things easier down the line. But I’ve never done anything like these before, so would happily defer to someone else’s experience or thoughts. I also don’t know how well or poorly each of these options would work from a code efficiency point of view either. I’ve only been coding for the past half year or so.

2

It’s probably the best to do both: inheritance and polymorphism. Make a base class with things all the different characters will have, maybe each character has it’s generic base skills, but each some specific other skills which other characters dont have. These will be in the derived classes.

What I did is I have one big script for all the gui handling (displaying the buttons and calling the appropriate functions etc.) and storing the skills, stats, armour, inventory items itself etc in the character class.

So if you were storing your inventory in your GUI script, move that to the character itself and try to let the character handle as much as possible of it’s own. Try to localise pretty much everything as long as it is practical and possible.

3

Thanks, yeah that sounds like a good idea. I’ve been thinking about it on and off the last couple of hours and I’m now tending more towards the individual objects each with their own scripts idea. Things like movement would need just one script as the whole party would move as one, as would general interfacing with the environment (pulling switches, opening doors, etc), the HUD, blah blah… I’m thinking I could put those all onto one game object, and then I could have 4 objects (each of the characters) as children of that object, and then they’d each have their own inventory and character scripts.

Also, as I haven’t fully designed the game yet (it started with me just messing about and seeing what I could get running), I think individualising it would make things easier for my own head down the line (a complete 180 from what I was originally thinking).

Though at the moment, I’ve split up the GUI scripts; I’ve separate ones for character sheets, inventory, movement and HUD. I could probably clean that up a good bit. I imagine all those separate OnGUI’s are unnecessary. I find all the Rect Variables and arrays for inventories a pain to thrall through in the inspector when you’re trying to rearrange things, which is one reason why I have the GUI so separated.

Thanks for the advice.