is this a stupid approach?

[SigneFedBatch]

(yeah funny title i know, you’ll see what i mean though. )

Hey, I’m working on a Tower Defense game and i was working on an Upgrade System for my Towers.

An Upgrade for a Tower can be as simple as a Stat Boost or a change in the Projectile used, systems that i already put in place successfully, but some upgrades can also completely change the Behavior of a Turret:

• The simplest example i can give is that of a Support Tower, which job is to give Buffs to Towers, De-Buff to Enemies or others, that once Upgraded can also fire at Enemies;

What i thought is that for that kind of thing to work i have to give the Support Tower the Scripts that make an Offensive Tower able to shoot at things, and what i made up is a System to makes this work (kinda lol):
(Im going to simplify the thing because i dont need a way to make it work, i just need to know if this is a good idea or not)

• Every Tower has an “AutoComponentAdd” Script; This has a List of strings, those being the names(Types) of the Scripts i want to add. With a method I get all these string, make them Type, and add them to the Turrets.
• These lists of strings can be given to the script from an Upgrade or by me from the Inspector (probably just for testing reasons).
• I open the Tower GUI in-game, I click the Button to Upgrade it and the Upgrade gives to this Script the strings, and from these strings I get a “Type” and then use it with AddComponent to finally add the Component.

I know its a really rough idea, but i would first like to know if this is actually a good idea to do this “Complete Behaviour Change” thing with the Upgrades, or if there’s another, better, way before i make it a fleshed out system.

So, is this a stupid approach to the problem? lol

If you didnt understand a thing, I’m available for clarifications.
Thanks in advance for everyone replying to this

[Kurt-Dekker]

I wouldn’t say it is stupid, but there are far better ways built into Unity.

You should consider learning about ScriptableObjects and then using them as assets on disk to control the game functions of each tower upgrade, all commonly processed through MonoBehaviours.

ScriptableObject usage in RPGs:

ScriptableObjects for an RPG with multiple units in your team

The most important concept about ScriptableObjects (SOs) is that they are custom-shaped blobs of data that you can edit inside the Unity inspector. The serialized values inside a SO map directly to that created asset on disk, the instance of the SO. When your game runs, it needs some data. One way to get that data is to hard-code it in the code. That is bad because when you change it, you need to change code. That’s why we have things like a SO to configure existing unchanging shipped code. W…

Creating lookup tables that can be assigned in the inspector.

This looks like a job tailor made for ScriptableObjects! ScriptableObjects are basically structured blobs of predefined data to help you create content for your game. For instance if I had a ScriptableObject called Weapon, it might have these properties: name detailed name description damage toughness weight what it looks like in the inventory what model it uses in game what animations the player uses to swing it I would create many of these Weapons, each one a file on disk (also called an…

Usage as a shared common data container:

Better Data with Scriptable Objects in Unity! (Tutorial)