Setting up two players (local multiplayer)

Questions & Answers
1

I’m making a local multiplayer game (for the first time) and I have a quick question as to how I should set up my scripts and project in general to work well.

Basically I have a script for movement, shooting, GUI and so on. I have set up a second movement script for player 2 (essentially the same script with different inputs). Is this a good way to go about setting up a project like this?

I’m asking because most of my scripts dont actually refer to the player gameobject just the object that they are attached too, so if I set up a set of duplicate scripts that essentially have a different name but still do the same thing so that player 2 will have its own health and weapon select is this good practice? Or should I for example have a shooting script that then refers to each player individually through gameobject.find or a public game object and drag each player into the inspector?

Thanks in advance!

2

Generally speaking, code duplication (i.e. writing code in two places that performs the same function) is always bad: it’s inefficient and hard to maintain.

Personally, I make all my players instantiate from the same generic player prefab with identical scripts, and have a “playerNum” variable set to, e.g. 1,2,3… to control and per-player functionality.