Junior Programmer: Manage Scene Flow and Data

Introduction

Milestone 4 exposed you to most of the advanced programming skills needed for basic Unity programming; milestone five will extend these ideas and start talking about the concept of “persistence” or storage/lifetime of data. These new tools and ideas will allow you to create Unity games containing multiple levels and different menus. You’ll also get some basic exposure to object-oriented programming, which will be expanded on in the next and final milestone. This milestone will also give you more important data structures, specifically the “manager” pattern, which is common throughout Unity. You’ll bring all of these skills together in the milestone project, which improves the original Caterpillar game extensively.

Goals

After completing this milestone, you should be able to demonstrate the following skills:

Learning Objectives

Content

Once again, you will be using Unity learn for your learning materials. Specifically, you should work through the “Manage scene flow and data” mission (part of the Junior Programmer pathway). This shorter Unity lesson focuses on menu development, movement between scenes, and data and game state management across multiple scenes. You’ll begin by setting up their sample project, followed by an introduction to object-oriented programming, and finish up by talking about data persistence.

Recommended

Because this is a short Unity Learn lesson, you should complete all of the tutorials in the mission.

Milestone Project – Caterpillar 2

For your milestone challenge, you will extend the ideas of the original Caterpillar game. You will work with data persistence, data movement, and level design to create a more comprehensive game.

Task 0: Download the Project Template

NOTE: There could be a version mismatch when downloading this Unity project to work on it. If Unity warns you about a version mismatch, open the project anyways with whatever version you have installed. We aren’t doing anything during these projects that would break if you use a different version of Unity.

Download the updated project template from the resources page to start this milestone. While we are improving the original, there are also other changes made to the game, which you will need to be successful with this milestone. The resources are located on our resources page under the milestone 5 heading. Assets are provided as a zip file containing an entire project inside. Extract the project from the file, and save it in a location that is convenient to you. Once extracted, you should be able to open the root folder project with Unity Hub (Hub > Open > Folder) and open the project in the Unity editor.

If you successfully opened the project, you should see the following asset structure:

Task 0.5: Understand the Changes to the Game

Because we made some changes between milestones, there will be some changes that you should be comfortable with. In fact, if you check the scripts folder, you’ll see a large number of new items. Let’s talk through the changes we are going to make:

Task 1: Make Some Levels

Before we start implementing the code, we need some example levels to play the game on. The updated version of the game will utilize multiple scenes to make the game more varied. Your first task is to make 3 to 5 new levels for your game. Each level should have some obstacles and is required to have an “exit” object (any game object you’d like as long as it has an “exit” script and collider on it (the collider should be set to “trigger” mode instead of collision mode). Make sure you name the levels in a reasonable way so you can load the scenes later!

A sample level is provided for you to use for your first level (containing all required objects). Feel free to edit this scene to change the level’s layout, but do not delete any managers in the level. You can (and should) also copy/paste the base of the level (floor, walls, exit) to your secondary levels to make your life easier.

Level Requirements

Once you’ve created all of the scenes, you should make sure you add them to the “build settings” (File > Build Settings). Drag each of your new scenes into the “Scenes In Build” window. Ordering does not matter.

Task 2: World Manager Singleton

The first major change you must make is turning the WorldManager class into a singleton class. As covered in the learning materials, we can use static variables to make code and data persistent (or accessible) between scenes and between objects. A singleton is a special subset of the static variable, where, as the name suggests, only one instance is allowed to exist at a time. If multiple versions exist, the copies are destroyed.

For correctness, the WorldManager must become a singleton class. Using the patterns discussed in the learning materials, you should first create a static “Instance” variable for the WorldManager. You should then turn this instance into a “singleton” by checking to see if it is already assigned before assigning the instance value. If you need a hint on how to accomplish this, the “GameManager” script (Instance variable and awake function) is a good guide on how to accomplish this.

Once you have created the singleton, you should also make it persistent. To do this, use Unity’s “DontDestroyOnLoad” function to ensure any data stored in the class is not destroyed when changing between scenes.

Task 3: World Manager World List

The world manager also needs to be able to load the levels you created; to do so, it needs the names of the scenes the levels are contained within. The supplied initial level must be used for the first level, but feel free to order your own custom levels however you’d like. Simply add your level names into the worldList variable to allow them to be loaded later.

Task 4: World Manager Functionality

Now that the world manager is set up, you must finish implementing the actual functionality for two functions.

Task 5: Using the World Manager

The biggest part of this project, the world manager, is fully implemented! Now it’s time to actually call the two functions you implemented to make the game’s scene flow work.

The first function is “OnTriggerEnter” in CaterpillarHead.cs. As you implemented before, the function currently detects when the caterpillar runs into something, be it food or its own body. We now also need to trigger an event when we run into an “Exit” gameobject. When an exit is collided with, the WorldManager needs to be told to load the next scene. A few key points to remember:

The second function is the “StartGame” function in the MenuManager. The StartGame function is called when the user exits the main menu and needs to start the game. You need to link this “StartGame” function in the MenuManager to the “StartGame” function in the WorldManager by calling it. Similar to the first half of this task, it’s important to reason about how you reference the WorldManager and call functions on it.

Task 6: Saving High Scores

Up to this point, we’ve looked at inter-scene persistence, singletons, and scene loading. The last important part of this milestone is using inter-game persistence. Sometimes it is important to keep data accessible after a game has been exited completely (high scores, save files, etc.). In our case, we need to save the game’s high scores to the computer to be potentially loaded after the game is closed. In this way, we can keep “real” high scores that actually have meaning. We can save persistent files (files that can be accessed after the game is closed) on the disk at a specific location (Unity docs). We will use JSON files to save our data to the disk, as that is what the learning materials used.

In “HighScores.cs”, you will complete the “WriteScores” function. The “WriteScores” function is responsible for writing a new file to disk containing scoreList (an array of scores). You need to convert the scoreList object into a JSON string (using the JSON Utility from the learning materials). This JSON string can then be written to a file on the computer using a C# function (C# docs). Once you’ve completed both of these things, you will have half of the high-score system working!

Task 7: Loading High Scores

Now that you’ve written the high score file to the disk, you need to also be able to read it back into the game when needed. For this, you should finish implementing the “LoadScores” function. For this function, you essentially need to do the opposite of what you did when saving the scores. First, you need to read the JSON file back into the game (as a string). Once you’ve loaded the file contents, you need to convert them back into a “ScoreList” object so you can actually read the high scores.

For this function, you’ll need to use a C# function to read the contents of the file (C# docs). From there, you need to use the same JSON utility you used in task 6, but use it in “reverse” (make an object from JSON, not turn it into JSON).

Once you’ve finished that, your game is done! You have experimented with three extremely important concepts in this milestone:

Keep these concepts in the back of your mind when programming games in the future. They are really helpful when coding if you want to keep things clean and organized. In the next milestone (the last one!) you’ll learn another important concept in coding Unity games – object-oriented programming. You’re almost done. Keep up the hard work, and finish strong!