Griddy: Unity Grid Toolkit (Free, Open-Source, Incomplete)

Community Showcases
1

Griddy: Unity Grid Toolkit

Description
I just started this project and it is far from being released. I wanted to mention it early to get feedback from interested parties. This post will expand as more progress is made.

This project generates a tile grid, and allows you to place buildings on the grid. You select your building type using buttons, and then prior to clicking, a transparent version of the building will appear with your cursor giving a ‘preview before placement’.

I have a lot planned for this toolkit, and I’ve rewritten scripts several times to make it more flexible to both game genre and mechanic. A system like this would work in a game like SimCity, Civilization, Command Conquer, Starcraft. It’ll work for tower defense games, real-time strategy games, or even as a map editor.

Updates
http://bit.ly/9tW9hx - Project Released on Github
http://waddlefarm.org/blog/?p=1536 - Weekend Prototype
http://waddlefarm.org/blog/?p=1528 - Terrain Types
http://waddlefarm.org/blog/?p=1521 - Introduction

Videos
http://vimeo.com/12072499

Updates / Following
The best way to get updates about this project would be to follow me on Twitter, or RSS on my blog, both of which are in my forum signature.

2

Looks really interesting for RTS games.

3

This looks great :smile: would love to see a version workable for Unity iPhone

4

Awesome job! How hard would it be to get it to work with shapes like a sphere or a cube and not just a plane? Cause that would be really cool.

5

@Coin-God
Thanks! RTS, tower defense, turn-based games, and map editors can all use this.

@Numonic
There is no reason why it wouldn’t work for iPhone. A different cursor system for placing the buildings would be the only change.

@kheng
It’s on my to-do list to figure out a hex-grid (or triangle, etc) which would work this way as well.

When you say sphere or cubes, do you mean for the tiles to build on? Technically your “tile” could be anything.

I’m trying to make this toolkit powerful and flexible. So, you could have buildings of different sizes (1x1 tile buildings, 2x2 tile buildings, even 2x4 buildings, etc). There is a list of features growing daily.

6

cool thing, can’t wait to get my greedy hands on it :~) Does it work with terrain?

7

There would be a number of ways to have this work. In the video, it is generated based on the Height and Width. In the future, I’d like it so you could load in a map via a textfile, or place the tiles manually. This wouldn’t be limited to rectangular grids.

It could work with the Unity terrain, depending on what you wanted to achieve. Also, tiles themselves can be flagged as different terrain types (roads, rivers, etc) so you could have something like Starcraft, where the Zerg can only build on the Creep, and other factions can’t.

8

a tutorial would be great! :?:

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I imagine that through the course of developing this package I will provided several small tutorials to cover a few features, but the full toolkit would contain much more.

10

Ahh if only I had this before we created Enercities :wink:

Keeping it generic will be a challenge but building a grid system is a lot of fun though! If you ever get stuck and need help, just give me a pm and maybe I can help you out.

11

I’ve added some basic terrain types which you can apply as if you were painting on a canvas.

http://waddlefarm.org/blog/?p=1528 - Terrain Types

@ Lukas
Thanks for the offer. It will be very difficult to keep ti generic. Eventually it’ll just branch into RTS feature set, Tower Defense feature set, city builder feature set, etc. I’m trying really hard NOT to put in any game logic though.

12

This weekend I’ll be trying a tower defense prototype using this system.

http://waddlefarm.org/blog/?p=1536 - Weekend Prototype

13

Darn, now i have someone to compete with. Your griddy system seems fast, and similiar to mine from what i saw with your video. Do you plan to keep upgrading this with pathfinding, or stick with tower defense?

14

The Griddy System will not have game logic. So, it won’t have Tower Defense logic, or RTS logic, etc.

The Griddy system is really just about placing and moving objects on a grid. So, it may contain a basic movement/path AI, but it’s main function is to allow for various terrain and various structures to work in a grid layout.

15

This is really great, nice work. A system like this will come in very handy for a project I am mulling over.

Best Regards,
Matt.

16

This looks quite promising, I can’t wait to see more!

17

Let me know when it is available, i will buy it!

18

that is really cool! :smile:

19

Hi! Amazing Project!!

And… thats exactly what i need to keep going on my tower defense game project.

Already did the wave system, health, gold, towers, shooters, everything, but got stuck on this grid thing (the creeps go don’t need to calculate paths, so i didn’t need grid until now).

I’m starting to get things going, but REAAAALLY SLOW! and i’m in a kind of a hurry, i only have 2 weeks left to finish this project.

So… is there any tutorials, examples, or anything u could direct me to? I must put my hands on an example. That grid manager is amazing… exactly what i need, such a shame i can’t wait till you launch your project.

20

Let me know if you’d like to sell this system through UnityPrefabs.com.
We have the logic in the works (pathfinding, obstacle avoidance, etc even for iPhone). Those would be two prefabs that go very well together. Drop me a line!
Cheers,
-TT