#10 | (WIP) Enemy System

Hello!

Now that I'm mostly satisfied with the blaster system, I've started work on the enemy system. Linked here is the current version of the GDD. So, now onto what I've done since the last log.

I've set up a rudimentary spawning system. While a Boolean is set to true, enemies will be spawned at all spawn points in the scene, followed by a delay before the spawning loop is started again.

When the enemies are spawned, they're spawned as a child of an empty game object, which is attached to the game controller. This is to keep the Hierarchy view organized. Linked below is a video of this in action.

Now, let's go over the code behind this.

Firstly, the variables. There are three lists, one for the enemy prefabs, one for the spawn points and one for the parent objects of the spawned enemies. These lists are set to private, but are serialized so I can view and edit them in the inspector. There is also a public float for the spawning delay followed by a Boolean, which if set to true, means enemies can spawn.

Each enemy type has it's own spawning method. When this method is called by the spawning loop (coroutine), one instance of the enemy will be spawned at each spawn point in the scene. The spawning methods for the different enemy types are virtually identical, with only the parent[i] and enemy type being spawned being different.

Lastly, let's go over the spawning loop. This coroutine is started when the script instance is being loaded (AKA when the game starts). While the Boolean "spawningEnabled" equals true, enemies are spawned after a delay. Once the enemies are spawned, the loop restarts at the top.

So that was the first version of the spawning script. After writing that, I discovered a way to shorten the script while still maintaining the same function. By setting method parameters (highlighted, pictured below), I could use those as local variables which could be set when the method is called.

For example, if I want to spawn a regular Zombie, I would call the "SpawnEnemy" method and pass in the index of the enemy game object and the index of it's parent object (from their respective lists).

This means that if I already know the index of both the enemy and it's parent object, I don't need to search for it with a loop, vastly reducing the necessary code. For reference, each unique spawning method was 24 lines of code. With this small change, each method is now only 4 lines of code! Shorter, simpler scripts are much easier to work with than long, complex ones.

I'm learning a lot from working on this project, I really love the learning process.

While enemies aren't spawning in waves yet, this is a solid start. I'll be working on a modular wave system next, which'll be a major upgrade to the enemy system as a whole.

Thanks for reading!