Technical Blog

Scene Management

Splitting up the scenes is important for a few reason. While it is useful for organization of the hierarchy, one of the main reasons is for team collaboration when using source control, only one person can make changes to a scene file without causing merge conflicts.

Core

This scene holds anything that needs to exist for the lifetime of the game. Another quirk to this scene is that it is the single point of entry of the game, even while pressing play in editor mode, this scene will be loaded first. Then for testing purposes you need a script to load to where you want to test/play.

Gameplay

This scene is similar to core. However, it lives for the lifetime of gameplay. Anything that will live from scene to scene will be here like a score tracker or player inventory.

UI

Any UI pieces will live here. It can be loaded/unloaded depending on gameplay needs.

Environment Scenes

These scenes can be anything from level scenes, cutscenes, or props. They hold anything related to the world or section the player is currently in. These are loaded in or out depending on the gameplay.

Tool/Cheat Scenes

These scenes are for development/tool usage. They can be loaded at will with either a developer button or toggle only available during development builds or inside of unity editor.

Talking Between Scenes

There is an added level of complexity that arises from using scene staking. In order to get around this, you need to use a mixture of a service locator, singletons, and events to name a few techniques.

Resource bar - Shadergraph

I wanted to create a resource bar that could fill a custom shape.

I created a shader that gave me the ability to change a sprite render's shape, color and enable it to dissolve in a non-linear way. I was really happy with what I made and it ended up fitting the aesthetic really well.

This is the basics of how it works.

You start with a gradient in the shape you want and with black being full(1) resource and white being empty(0). Then you have two branching paths. One path is the current percentage of resource and the other path is the amount of change. Each path then uses a step node, which gives you which pixel to show based on the percentage of the resource by only showing the pixels that are below the percentage. Then you multiply by the base shape to clear the gradient coloring and then multiply by the color you want and add both branches togther to get the output.

Then outside of shader graph, I put a background using another sprite render stacked on top and a background with another sprite shader stacked below.

The Shader graph.

The relatively simple code to control it.

(Note by the constraints of the jam, I could not use DOTween. So using the Update is overkill and I would not normally use this route.)

Another form of the material is the player health was the shape of the frosting on their head.