I am developing a card game currently and I was wondering what would be the best way to store these cards in your opinion? I have already developed the card class, deck class etc. with oop methodology in mind and have created scriptable objects to be able to create the cards from the editor.
All the functionality works fine, but my “card manager” currently is just a script attached to an empty gameObject in my scene.
I wish to have this as a “global collection” or something along those lines as its just a set of all legal cards that can be referenced when generating decks etc. I tried finding some solutions from others regarding similar topics but I was not really able to find anything of value. What would you all do to solve this issue?
The card collection is just a list of Card scriptable objects containing metadata. For future-proofing I would want the collection to be a class so that I could define multiple collections kinda of like hearthstone does when they release new sets.
Store the card’s logical representation separate from its visual presentation. ScriptableObjects can be handy here.
All of your internal game code should NEVER touch the visual presentation, except for the one module that presents it onscreen.
Have a clear representation in your mind about what is fixed data (eg, the card and its behaviours) and what is instanced during gameplay (the card’s health, tapped state, presence on the board, etc.)
Do not conflate those two ideas or you will quickly make a mess.
That’s not a thing. Solve for the problem you have now (the lack of a card game to even play with) and fix that first.
Solving problems you THINK you might have in the future is a guaranteed way to have problems NOW.
Try this approach:
Imphenzia: How Did I Learn To Make Games:
Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:
How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:
Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That’s how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped. Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don’t make any mistakes. BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!
If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.
Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.
Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.
Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there’s an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.
Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!
Finally, when you have errors, don’t post here… just go fix your errors! Here’s how:
Remember: NOBODY here memorizes error codes. That’s not a thing. The error code is absolutely the least useful part of the error. It serves no purpose at all. Forget the error code. Put it out of your mind.
The complete error message contains everything you need to know to fix the error yourself.
The important parts of the error message are:
the description of the error itself (google this; you are NEVER the first one!)
the file it occurred in (critical!)
the line number and character position (the two numbers in parentheses)
also possibly useful is the stack trace (all the lines of text in the lower console window)
Always start with the FIRST error in the console window, as sometimes that error causes or compounds some or all of the subsequent errors. Often the error will be immediately prior to the indicated line, so make sure to check there as well.
Look in the documentation. Every API you attempt to use is probably documented somewhere. Are you using it correctly? Are you spelling it correctly? Are you structuring the syntax correctly? Look for examples!
All of that information is in the actual error message and you must pay attention to it. Learn how to identify it instantly so you don’t have to stop your progress and fiddle around with the forum.
Hey, thanks for the reply. I have already created a working game. I don’t have any visuals right now and I am perfectly aware that the logical code shouldnt be reliant on the visual information at all which is why I have approached the development of the game using oop principles. My question was not related to any visual representation, my question is about storing a registry of cards so that my code can reference this registry logically to see if cards added to a deck for example is valid.
I wish to hear peoples solutions to creating global collection of an object that can be referenced over all scenes without having to keep a scene unloaded. I have already gotten the collection script to work locally in a scene, but I find it annoying having to load that script in every scene.
I have developed a couple games earlier to release, I’m just curious to hear how other people handle collections of objects that would be used over all scenes.
One way or another there will be a list of all cards. Unlocked cards would be a list of ID numbers, so would cards in the current deck, and so on. and of course those ID#'s would be next to pointers to the card – use the pointers during play, use the ID#'s to save/read data.
The list of cards could be in a scriptableObject: Cards[ ] AllCards;, where each entry points to either another scriptable “card” object, or gets filled-in right there (or read from a file). Or the same list could be in a pre-loaded scene. One scene has the empty with the master list of cards, and everything else is loaded additively. Both methods are pretty much the same, and it shouldn’t be too hard to swap them around. I like the second since additively loading scenes is good for other things – like having several scenes with animated battle-mats where one can loaded along-side the standard game-playing scene.
A cards game is a good candidate for a central game manager.
I would create a DeckSystem/Manager Singleton that exposes an IReadOnlyList so that other classes can still access the decks but cannot modify them (encapsulation is always good), plus any other method related to decks like bool CanAddCardToDeck(int deckId, int cardId), IEnumerable<Card> GetAllCards(int deckId), void UseCard(int deckId, int cardId)…etc
The DeckSystem can also expose useful events for other Systems to listen to like event EventHandler<Card> CardUsed or event EventHandler<Card> CardAdded and act accordingly (play sound, update UI…)
Bonus: Loading/Saving would be very easy, since all/most of the data necessary for the game will be contained within this System/Manager.
Hello! To manage decks you would probably want to store them in json or similar format after you have formed them. You would need to save them and then load them at runtime. Check this out: Card Game Core | Systems | Unity Asset Store. Looks like it is already done here.
