The Project
This flexible Unity package uses Scriptable Objects to manage Game Events and Game States in Unity. I love using this package because creating and managing new events easy. It can be imported into virtually any Unity project.
Why Game Events?
Example: We want to update the UI health bar when the player takes damage. There are a couple of ways we could handle this:
- Option 1 - Check every frame to see if the health has changed and update the UI when it does.
- Very slow. Wasting lots of unnecessary bandwidth making these checks.
- Option 2 - Write a specific UI update function into each damage function
- This could work. However, if there are many different ways to damage the player, we will be rewriting a lot of redundant code that will be hard to manage down the line.
- Option 3 - Send a
take_damagegame event. This acts as a signal for any function “listening” to this event.- This is our best option. We can write an update UI function that will listen for the
take_damageevent. This setup makes our lives easier because we can have other functions listen to this event, such as playing animations or voice lines.
- This is our best option. We can write an update UI function that will listen for the
Taking It Further with Game States
Building off the Game Event structure, I also designed this package to manage Game States. For instance, if I as the developer wanted to track what “state” the game is in such as MainMenu, Combat, Paused, etc. Since I built the package using Scriptable Objects, it’s easy to scale as many or as few game states as need.
How it Works
Game Events
../Events/Scripts/Game Events/GameEvent.cs creates the GameEvent class as a ScriptableObject and the functions for raising the event and registering listeners.
../Events/Scripts/Game Events/GameEventListener.cs is a MonoBehaviour that registers itself as a listener, can raise the event, and pass data when the event is raised.
Game States
../Events/Scripts/Game State/GameStateManager.cs is a MonoBehaviour static instance that tracks the current game state and raises an event when the game state changes.
../Events/Scripts/Game State/GameStateObject.cs creates the GameStateObject class as a ScriptableObject and the OnStateEnter() and OnStateExit() functions.
Installation
To install, follow Unity’s guide to Install a UPM package from a Git URL and use the URL from the project’s GitHub.
Credits
Here are some great guides that I’ve consulted to build this package: