Tracking whether actions have taken place already

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

I finished my first early release of my first game a few weeks ago. It was the first time I made an actual UI that prompted up to the user based on things they did through the game (like a tutorial initially). I did this by using a whole load of boolean fields and storing them in a LevelManager script and then accessing them from various other scripts across the game when certain things occurred (e.g. player moves within a collider of a planet, it checks whether the boolean flag for “first time in the planet” is false and then does something).

So all these booleans look like this:

    public bool firstTimeWithinRangeOfMotherhship = false; // first time the player moves
    public bool seenMothership = false; // track whether the ship has been seen before
    public bool seenFirstResourcePlanet = false; // track whether ship has seen planet before
    public bool seenFirstOrbitalMinerPlanet = false; // as above!
    public bool firstOrbitalMinerIsMining = false;
    public bool resourcesToSaveShipCollected = false;
    public bool firstDialogueCompleted = false;
    public bool firstMinerBuilt = false;

It all worked fine, but it just didn’t exactly feel like a very neat way to do it. And the use of the variables was spread across all the other scripts so I could see maintenance being a pain.

It’s obviously a very common thing to need to do, to trigger things based on a player doing something for the first time and then not again when it does it a second time… so I just thought I’d check on here whether there is a better way to do this kind of thing.

Thanks in advance.

2

Looks pretty tidy to me! The benefit of putting it all in one structure is you have a leg up on loading/saving your game state: just JSON serialize the object they’re in and write that string to disk!

I would also add that your variable names are spot-on. If I was looking at this code and you weren’t around, I don’t think I’d have a hard time figuring out what controls what.

1 Like
3

thanks Kurt, I’ve not actually implemented saving before! but that makes a lot of sense yeah, I guess you don’t then need to go around storing every single object. Thanks!

4

These could be marked static (because they are game-wide values), they’re then accessible anywhere without needing to manually “get” the script they’re in from the calling script (with GetComponent etc). Also they would persist across scenes.

5

True… but then you cannot serialize them with JSON to save/load them. :slight_smile:

Also, this is my go-to for super-simple Unity singleton:

Simple Singleton (UnitySingleton):

Some super-simple Singleton examples to take and modify:

Simple Unity3D Singleton (no predefined data):

Unity3D Singleton with Prefab used for predefined data:

These are pure-code solutions, do not put anything into any scene, just access it via .Instance!

If you want to save even more typing, shorten Instance to I