New to Unity, but very specific...

Learn Content
1

Hello. My name is Chris, and I am new to Unity.
God I feel like I’m at an AA meeting making posts like these…so I’m going to just skip straight to the meat…and cookies. There’s juice too if you want it!

I’m looking at making a game that is a mesh of a few various games’ components. My background is sketchy at best, but I believe this is something I can accomplish with some guidance (and possibly help, but I’m not out asking to create a team or get submissions/etc). I’ve had a few programming classes, but they teach you to create applications for businesses (general IT degree). I’m hitting a bump when it comes to the terrain/world. Scripting I believe I can comprehend/rough-draft at least when I get there, and art should be accomplishable at the least.

I do have to say I’m a bit protective of my idea, because I think it will do well. Let me describe it the best I can:

First, the world/terrain/view(camera). It will be similar to “A Link to The Past” on the SNES system, I believe most call it Isometric. I would honestly prefer an interactive world, which may be voxels (think Minecraft) that you can gather/alter/build if you want. It isn’t a core component, but would greatly complement the game.
The component of the game that is most core to it is the crafting/creating, and the RPG-esque quest lines. The issue I’m having at the moment is simply creating the world and terrain. The tutorials I see do not hold the meat I seek in learning how to create either:
Voxel-based terrain (not of the detail where voxels are used to create caves, etc…but similar to Minecraft) with values per voxel…or a grid/tile-based terrain, again with values per square.
I could do a 2D terrain that has a say, 1-4 chance of attempts which pull a reward/return value off a table of items (say you “dig” like in aforementioned SNES game with a shovel, and dig up a value of grass seed, or what have you). In this world I could also represent sprites with trees and have them removable as well, and growable.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for a chunk of code I can analyze, or possibly even a tutorial on creating this terrain? I have looked endlessly for days (most of it on my phone at work) to find a tutorial on such, but most point towards fully three-dimensional gaming/terrains which is not what I’m aiming to do. When I create 1x1 pieces of terrain in Unity, it looks ideal, but I would need to assign it values for gathering which I am at a bit of a loss for.

Something similar to this would be ideal actually:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/68440-2.5D-RPG-Strategy-etc-Engine

I’m not asking to copy, I’m asking for an explanation (or direction to discover an explanation) behind the creation and functionality of such a thing.

Again, thank you ahead of time for reading this, and hopefully for responding.

2

Hi Daimyo,

I’m not sure, but I think what you are asking for is a state-engine. You need to track the state and response of interacting with the terrain “voxels.” They will react differently according to what you have- shovel, watering can, fertilizer, etc. I cover state management and design, inventory and other useful concepts in my book. The book project is for a classic first person adventure, but the concepts and code you develop are generic and useful for many other genre. You could probably skip the first 5 chapters and get right into the state management part.

State management is more about concept than the actual code and can be implemented in many different ways. Because of that it is a much larger topic than can be covered in a few forum posts. Because it concerns a lot of theory, and the functionality is fairly specific to each person’s game, it is not often covered in video tutorials. In the book, you create a system for managing interactive objects that allows you to add as many interactive objects as you want using the same two scripts on all of them. I think this is what you are looking for, at least in concept.

We’ve got a thread for the book here: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/93775-Beginning-3D-Game-Development-with-Unity. A couple of the guys are just getting to the state management chapters now, so you could ask for their opinion.

-Sue