Unity RPG Course - Section 4 - Finished Demo

Section 4 - The toughest, and most rewarding section of the course. Here you learn to finish strong, with clean code, few bugs, and great features. This is real game dev right here.

The full Unity RPG course is part of a Kickstarter campaign which was over 200% funded. You will benefit from the fact we have already taught over 360,336 students game development, many shipping commercial games as a result.

You're welcome to download, fork or do whatever else legal with all the files! Please note that some sections contain assets with commercial use restrictions. The real value is in our huge, high-quality online tutorials that accompany this repo. You can check out the course here: Unity RPG

In This Section

How To Build / Compile

This is a Unity project. If you're familiar with source control, then "clone this repo". Otherwise download the contents, and navigate to Assets > Levels then open any .unity file.

This branch is the course branch, each commit corresponds to a lecture in the course. The current state is our latest progress.

Lecture List

Here are the lectures of the course for this section...

1 Section 4 Introduction

1. What we're going to cover in this section.
2. Why this material is SO important.
3. Ben will start, Rick will finish.
4. A few new features but a LOT of polish.

2 From Interface To Inheritance

1. Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) Principle.
2. Inheritance can help us centralise.
3. It's often easy to change an interface to inheritance.
4. Create the new parent class, then delete the interface.
5. Getting code running again may require abstract and override.

3 Less Lines Of Code Is Better

1. Move all PlayParticleEffect() code to parent class.
2. Use "down-casting" with caution for configs.
3. Setup prefab based idiom for world vs local particle space.

4 Centralise And Improve Audio Clips

1. Move special ability audio to AbilityBehaviour.cs.
2. Use the PlayOneShot() method to play clips at the same time.
3. Import Rick's special ability sound effects.

5 Making Abstract Methods Concrete

1. Move AttachComponentTo() method to parent class.
2. Refactor to simplify code as practice.

6 Weapon Pickup Points

1. Creating what's effectively nested prefabs!
2. How to use [ExecuteInEditMode] annotation.
3. Detecting play mode with Application.isPlaying
4. Trigger a sound effect when weapon is collected.

7 Weapon Change Mechanics

1. Destroy previous weapon by keeping member variable.
2. The Player class is becoming a "god object" (see Resource links).
3. Change runtime animation on weapon swap.

8 Eliminate AICharacterControl

1. Remove Unity's AICharacterControl.cs class.
2. Make PlayerMovement more general CharacterMovement.
3. Overall reduce our code base by 68 lines.

9 Simplify Unity's ThirdPersonCharacter Class

1. Remove jump and crouch arguments.
2. Remove all un-necessary methods.
3. Remove un-used member variables.

10 Introducing Unity 2017

1. Upgrade our project to Unity 2017.
2. Fix anything that isn't working.
3. Overview the new features in Unity 2017.

11 Caution With Callbacks In Refactors

1. About the OnAnimatorMove() callback.
2. Using this to adjust root motion speed.
3. How call-backs can catch you out in refactors.

12 Eliminating ThirdPersonCharacter.cs

1. Refactor our code in place to get an understanding.
2. Bring Unity's code in line with our code standards.
3. Move all code from ThirdPersonCharacter to CharacterMovement.

13 Extracting a DamageSystem Component

1. With special abilities we turned an interface into inheritance.
2. Now we turn the IDamageable interface into a component.
3. Extract all damage, healing and health bar code.

14 Getting To Compilation With Focus

1. Don't be distracted when not compiling.
2. Just solve the errors, get running & commit.
3. Complete extraction of HealthSystem.

15 Centralising Special Ability Code

1. Drawing a comparison with Health System.
2. Using the "Pomodoro Technique" for 20-min chunks.
3. Make energy and special abilities self contained.
4. How to write an alternative getter format in C#.

16 Eliminate A Struct And Interface

1. Remove the AbilityUseParams struct.
2. Eliminate the IDamageable interface.

17 Using Optional Parameters In C#

1. Review our code to ensure we "own" it.
2. Get special abilities working again.
3. Use an optional parameter in C#.
4. Setup an out of energy SFX.

18 Having Characters Build Themselves

1. Using the [SelectionBase] attribute.
2. Making characters add their own component on Awake().

19 Completing Character Self-Setup

1. Finish the work we started in the last lecture as a challenge.

20 A SetDestination() Movement API

1. Both PlayerControl and EnemyAI set world space destinations.
2. This will work for mouse, but would need to be modified for gamepad.
3. Take all input listening out of the character.
4. Start to really focus PlayerControl on it's sole function.

21 A Strong Character Basis

1. Review how the character part of the player works.
2. Create a dedicated animator override controller per enemy.
3. Build a character from scratch as the basis of an enemy.
4. Demonstrate our architecture by possessing as player.

22 Slowly Extracting WeaponSystem

1. Extract a few member variables at a time.
2. Keep your code close to compilation.
3. Provide new getter methods as needed.
4. Know when to stop and commit your work!

23 Recap And Review When Tired

1. Beeminder is a useful tool for accountability.
2. When you're tired you can still move forward.
3. How to recover Scriptable Objects that you can't inspect.
4. A strategy for handling todo tags in code.

24 Simplifying Enemy To EnemyAI

1. What makes an enemy an enemy?
2. Remove member variables relating to WeaponSystem.
3. Use RequireComponent appropriately.
4. Make enemy attack radius depend on weapon.
5. Is GetComponent() slow? OK to call in Update()?

25 AI Behaviour Tree In Unity

1. Outline our required enemy behaviour in pseudocode.
2. Use an enum to track the enemy's state
3. Use co-routines to patrol, attack, chase, etc.
4. Use the inspector debug mode to see it working.

26 Waypoint Paths With Editor Gizmos

1. A simple scheme for defining patrol paths.
2. A new WaypointContainer class.
3. Setup a couple of test paths.

27 Patrolling Using Coroutines

1. How yield break; works
2. Care of infinite loops with while (true)
3. Pseudocode to help you keep a consistent level of abstraction.

28 Automatic Repeat Attacking

1. How to use Debug.Break() to pause on error.
2. Using a co-routine for repeat attacks.

29 Stopping Coroutines In Update

1. Our target could die at any time.
2. We will test for deadness, and out of range every frame.
3. Using StopAllCoroutines() to do just that!

30 Special Ability Animations

1. How to trigger an animation for each special ability.

31 Running Coroutines In Series

1. Setup move and attack.
2. Setup move and power attack.

32 Finishing The Fight

1. Fix the enemy UI.
2. Fix coroutine logic to stop attacking
3. Review our // todo items.

33 Finishing The Weapon System

1. Challenge to fix the weapon pickup (see resources)
2. Create a ranged character
3. Delete Projectile.cs
4. Resolve all todo items in the entire project!
5. Fix bug where level doesn't re-load on player death.

34 Polish Audit

1. Explanation of our polish audit process.
2. Creation of our polish list, phases and priorities.
3. Creation of polish database.

35 Tuning Paradigms

1. Execution - Intention
2. Intention - Execution
3. Imitation - Execution

36 Rebuilding Enemies

1. Updates of our spreadsheet
2. Base damage and weapon damage approach
3. Checklist for building a new enemy

37 Surprise And Delight

1. Our current goals for our prototype level.
2. Types of ways that we can surprise and delight our players.
3. The surprise and delight we will be using for our game.

38 Continuous Attack Bug

1. How to decide what to do first.
2. Fixing the continuous attacking bug.

39 Lazy Enemy Bug

1. Identify nature of bug - enemy not attacking in certain states.
2. Map out the enemy state machine options.
3. Add variables to more clearly show what distance the player is to the enemy.

40 Dialogue Workflow

1. High level story for your level.
2. Key story beats.
3. Step-by-step level flow with script.
4. Record placeholder dialogue.
5. Record final dialogue.

41 NPCs That Don't Hit

1. Create a new NPC character.
2. Add new NPC_None weapon which does no damage.
3. Change the NPC's chase radius, turn off canvas, set layer to ignore raycast.

42 Wandering NPCs

1. Create your character's waypoints.
2. Understand and alter the character's max forward setting for animation blendtree.
3. Tuning so that NPC stops and looks at player.

43 Grip Scaler

1. Identify why the player's weapon is not visible.
2. Create a grip scaler, place on dominant hand then place dominant hand script onto grip scaler.

44 Easier To Hit Enemies

1. Identify the problem - enemies are difficult to click on.
2. Create the solution - expand the enemy's capsule colliders.

45 Ben's Bug Bashing Bonanza

1. Oh, we upgraded to Unity 2017.1.1 by the way.
2. Review Rick's off-screen changes.
3. Fix the player canvas UI and re-link.
4. Allow for no energy bars.
5. Fix an animation event error.
6. Fix attack timings once and for all.

46 Achieving Audio Awesomeness

1. "Cherry-pick" some changes in git.
2. Identify cross-talk bug.
3. How gameObject is global state.
4. Change AudioTrigger paradigm.

47 More Death Bugs

1. Identify problem - death audio not triggering.
2. Change order of audio triggering for death of characters.

48 Music And Ambience

1. Let's add some music to our game.
2. Playing with volume and pitch of audio track.
3. Placing ambient triggered effects.

49 Tweak Your Lighting

1. Changing your overall scene lighting to be softer and more interesting.
2. Adding point lights to highlight certain areas of interest.
3. Combining lighting with particles effects.

50 Final Design Thoughts

1. Reviewing all of the amazing development you've done on your project to date.
2. Ideas for expanding on core combat to personalise it to your game.

51 Congratulations

1. Well done for finishing this course.
2. Keep working on and improving your game.
3. Schedule for upcoming content.