Best Practices for Random Events?

As a general question, what are some best practices for storing and accessing random events in a Unity game?

So far I've just been writing big JSON files that store text elements, image names, and various requirements based on player stats or items. However, adding new events or event chains feels very clunky, and there's no easy way to track the event relationships or arrange them in an Editor-viewable format using that JSON.

I've thought about creating a custom inspector for a custom "event" class so that I can do everything in the editor, but I'm not sure if that's worth the time.

 

Maybe a scriptable object for each event with the results, all needed data and a chance to happen.
Then have 1 class with simply an array of the objects

 

How do events and the json data relate? What kind of events, Unity event or C# event or game specific actions?

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish it may be helpful to look at some assets for guidance or even just using it, for example a fully fleshed out resource, items and crafting system.

If by events you mean something more like scripting you should also take a look at GraphView and assets that use graphs like NodeCanvas, BehaviourTree and others to script (conditional) action sequences without having to resort to low-level Visual Scripting.

 

What about Excel? That way you can see them all in a relatively compact table form, run comparisons, and easily tweak numbers.

It's pretty simple to export Excel to CSV and read it into Unity.

 

Thanks for this. I can't remember why I went JSON over CSV back when I first started messing with Unity but it would make things a lot easier.

 

It might have been because Unity has a built-in JsonUtility class, but no corresponding class for CSV. Fortunately CSV is fairly easy to parse, and I'm sure you can find some code in a github gist if you don't feel like typing it up yourself. Or you can use Unity-Quicksheet to import xlsx files directly so you don't have to export to CSV.