[RELEASED] Trigger Me Timbers -- Build your game with reusable building blocks

Hey folks, I'm excited to share a project I've been working on:
Trigger Me Timbers

Trigger Me Timbers breaks apart cause and effect and standardizes how they communicate with one another.
This allows new users of Unity to have an easier time understanding how to compose GameObjects, as well as provide a standardized framework for experienced users to save a bunch of time in development.

Asset Store | User Guides | API Documentation | Support Discord | Our Website​

Build your game with reusable building blocks -- Components that do one job, and do it well. No programming required, build your game as Unity intended.



Add polish with animations -- Preset transitions or create your own custom animations to take more control.



Tons of features to save you time -- Easy debugging and testing, intelligent adding of relevant components, use inheritance or an interface to easily hook in, and much more.

Features


TRIGGERS
The “cause” half of “cause and effect”, these will notify Triggerables that something in the game world has changed.

• Drag and drop pre-built Triggers onto GameObjects and connect your game world by:
  • Pressing or holding any combination of keys / mouse buttons / gamepad buttons / etc.
  • Hovering over or clicking something in the menu
  • Turning a GameObject or individual component on or off
  • Loading a scene
  • Having objects collide with one another, either with specific tags, or any collisions
  • After a certain amount of time has passed
  • And much more...
• Limit Triggers to only be hit a certain number of times, or allow them to be hit infinitely
• Triggers can be hit instantly, or after a delay
• Accurately debug your setup just by using the context menu in the inspector, no need to run around your game world
• Quickly copy shared settings and references between completely different Trigger types in case you change your mind on how things you want to set something up
• Combine your logic together with the powerful TriggerFilter component, which can take many Triggers as inputs. Output a value if all inputs are true, any inputs are true, all inputs are false, or any inputs are false.
• Automatically finds any relevant components when being added to your GameObject so you don’t have to hook things up manually

TRIGGERABLES
The “effect” half of “cause and effect”, these change something about the game world.

• Drag and drop pre-built Triggerables to make your game world come to life by:
  • Moving your character around
  • Playing sound effects and music
  • Turning on some explosions
  • Displaying the pause menu
  • Changing the mouse cursor to a grabby hand
  • Panning the camera to show the super evil boss
  • Selecting something for your new player on the tutorial screen
  • Changing the color of some pretty lights
  • And much more...
• Quickly make anything in your code a Triggerable just by implementing the ITriggerable interface
• Spoof hits of true and false to quickly test behaviours
• Easily implement a FloatValueSetter to change any available float value in your game with the TriggerableSetFloat component
• Automatically cache values before modification making them easy to reset

TRANSITION DEFINITIONS AND VALUE SETTERS
Sets values in your game world instantly or by transitioning over time.

• Pre-built Value Setters to add polish by
  • Fading in text and panels when moving around in the menus
  • Making a fluorescent light flicker when turning it on
  • Subtly increasing the volume of your ambient music while the hero explores a beautiful landscape
  • Pulsing a health bar red when it’s low
  • Making a button glow when you hover over it
  • And much more...
• Value Setters are intelligently added to GameObjects and referenced when needed
• Define a transition once and reuse it anywhere in your project, standardizing the time and type of effect many objects have
• Easily tweak your transitions in play mode and they are changed everywhere

DUSTPRODUCTIONS.CORE
Reduce boilerplate code and get things done faster.

• Hundreds of game ready art assets from KenneyNL converted to sprites and UI buttons for use in Unity, in addition to several prototyping materials
• Dozens of extension methods to make life easier when working with all sorts of data
  • Rounding and float approximations
  • Getting references to or adding components of a certain type on a GameObject
  • Shortcuts for working with arrays of AudioSources, MonoBehaviours, GameObjects, and generic arrays
  • And dozens more...
• Easily let other Components know when a Component was added to a GameObject
• Keep track of running Coroutines, in addition to being able to cancel them with one method call
• Create custom cursors from images, and swap the player’s cursor whenever you want
• Custom Property Drawers to make buttons, hide a field unless some condition is met, and convert an array of strings into a dropdown for your inspector windows
• Plus tons more stuff to work with files on disk, use reflection, work with the Jobs system, work with bitmasks, and more to save you time and reduce code complexity

EXAMPLES
Trigger Me Timbers comes with several example scenes to get you started.

• FloppyCubeAdventure - A whole adventure game built using just Core and Trigger Me Timbers
• MainMenu - A nicely laid out way to possibly build a large menu system
• PhoneScreen - Learn how to use object composition to create professional effects
• TriggerableSetTransformValues - Learn how to set positions of GameObjects, and when to use cached values or custom values
• TriggerFilter - Change values on a TriggerFliter to see the resulting output
• TabbedMenu - A step by step tutorial made with Trigger Me Timbers for Trigger Me Timbers

MORE INFORMATION

Asset Store | User Guides | API Documentation | Support Discord | Our Website​

Please feel free to use this thread and / or join our discord server if you have any questions. Cheers!

 

Looks good, very good.
Using both "The Adventure Toolkit" and "Gameflow" I can see many possibilities for this as well.

Before purchasing....
For us beginners,Dusty, do we need to do any scripting at all in order to use your product.. .productively?
Can we simply click away at various options to achieve results that are described?
Not that I mind scripting but being thickish as a brickish I prefer lots of public variables

I like the way you have written your tutorials. A very good lesson for others. Well done.

 

You can get started with Trigger Me Timbers without doing any scripting. It comes with a set of over 30 components that can be used and combined together to create more advanced behaviour in your project. That said, many games have things unique to them that Trigger Me Timbers will not be able to do out of the box. An example might be your health system for your game. some games have shields, and some games have armor, and some games have different damage types, etc. That unique stuff is where you would want to make your own Triggers and Triggerables. so an example might be a TriggerableRemovePlayerHealth, where you can specify the amount of health to remove, whether it ignores armor, things like that. Then you can use something like the built in TriggerOnCollision on some spikes, hook that up to the TriggerableRemovePlayerHealth you created and you are all set.

In short: It depends on how complex your game is. If it's less complex, then you might not need to create anything custom. If it's more complex, then I've made it quite easy to hook into the system.

If you have any other questions, feel free to let me know!

 

Many thanks for that.
With the use of Unity2017.2, what difficulties might there be?
I know I should upgrade but I'm still nervous about 2019 versions.
Will Trigger me timbers work ok with 2017.2?
Thanks,

 

The Asset currently only works with 2018.2 or above. Most people have updated to 2018, so I no longer maintain a 2017 version. IF you were unable to upgrade to 2018 for some reason I could get you hooked up with a 2017 version, so long as you know it is not actively maintained, and may have some bugs that have been fixed in the 2018 version.

 

Ok. Thanks. Will let you know how it works out.
2018.4. Here I come!

 

Hey Dusty..
Having lots of frustration with 2018 versions.
Do not like the way the Build Standalones are done now (!!!)... and find that 2018.4 crashed a lot when importing my stuff. Off topic I know but to me 2018.xxx needs some further thoughts.
Apparently several folk have had this trouble.

So: In the meantime..
I'll use my 2017.2 until 2019 looks stable enough and I am in the mood to change and study up on it..
SO..how do I "hook up with a 2017.2 version.
Shall I purchase the current version through the Asset Store and then let you know?
How should I contact you when this is done?
Thanks.

 

Responded via email

 

Trigger Me Timbers version 1.0.1 is now released.


Here are the release notes:
• Fixed issue with Singleton.Instance not being set when the singleton already exists in the scene
• Fixed issue with TriggerOnKeyPress where GetKey was used instead of GetKeyUp, causing unexpected behaviour
+ Added minimum hits for Trigger.cs to allow you to only send Triggers after the minimum
+ Added TriggerableQuitApplication to make it easy to quit your game
+ Added TriggerOnParticleCollision to have a basic way to make things happen when particles collide with something

 

Trigger Me Timbers is part of the Cyber Week sale for a HUGE 40% off! This is the only time of year I have put the asset on sale. If you are considering buying, you've got until December 13th to save. Please reach out here or (if you want faster answers) via discord if you have any pre-purchase questions.

 

I also neglected to mention that 5 people who join the discord server before midnight December, 10th will be randomly selected to get the asset for free. Even if you don't get the asset for free, you will still have a few days to get it for the reduced price for the sale.

Please feel free to join us, ask any questions you might have, etc. Cheers!

 

Hi, Greetings.

I tried installing ( Trigger Me Timbers ) ( Version 1.0.1 - November 18, 2019 ) in Unity 2021.1.26f1, and I got this Error bellow......

Library\PackageCache\com.unity.shadergraph@11.0.0\Editor\Drawing\Views\MaterialGraphView.cs(1331,40): error CS0117: 'UIUtilities' does not contain a definition for 'CalculateCentroid'

I tried my best for solution to fix it, but unfortunately no way.

Kindly help me to solve this issue.
Thanks a lot

 

Hey Wrakyz,
This looks like an error from shader graph, which Trigger Me Timbers does not use. Can you confirm Trigger Me Timbers is the cause of this error by uninstalling it and seeing if the error goes away?

 

Hi DustyDev,

First of all Thanks for replaying to my message, I really appreciate you.
Unfortunately after uninstalling (Trigger Me Timbers) the error goes away, and once reinstalling it, the error it shows again. In fact I tried installing Trigger Me Timbers in my project, even in an empty project but I'm getting the same error.

Library\PackageCache\com.unity.shadergraph@11.0.0\Editor\Drawing\Views\MaterialGraphView.cs(1331,40): error CS0117: 'UIUtilities' does not contain a definition for 'CalculateCentroid'

The problem that this specific error comes only after installing (Trigger Me Timbers) only, and not with any other assets !
I'll try to install it in standard Unity built in and in an empty project, then I'll update you...

Thanks again

 

Update....

Yup, as I expected, it's working very well in (standard built in) with no single error, but conflicted with (High Definition RP), maybe Unity (HD RP) concerned with 'CalculateCentroid' ?!!!...

Anyhow, every day we are discovering and learning something new here
Have a great day.

 

Oh, yeah. The materials provided won't work with the SRPs. It's built-in only. you can use the code portions of Trigger Me Timbers if you delete the materials that come with the project. Those materials are only used for the FloppyCube and other demo scenes. They aren't needed in any way for the core asset functionality. Glad you were able to figure this one out. Cheers!

 

I already tried to delete and even replace all the materials, But the error still there !

The image below shows the exact argument line.

 

Awesome, thanks for the detailed response. I'll take a look at this and let you know if I can find a solution.

 

@Wrakyz Ok, I did some digging this weekend and was able to reproduce the issue. Unfortunately, I still think this is some sort of strange Unity error. The error is happening in their code (in Shader Graph). It is also only happening with the DLL version of the asset. When I import the asset as source code, there is no error. My best guess is that something the editor is calling something when the DLL is present, and it's running into that error. I'm going to try some different Unity versions to see if that avoids the problem. I'll report back when I've found something.

 

Greetings to you DustyDev, and also to everyone here,

You are right, Unfortunately the issue comes from Unity itself, I think the package catch in the library has strange rules which is related to the UI and other codes or the DLL, etc... Sorry, I'm not that expert programmer, Some times these challenges will teach you something new and most of the time it takes you far away from the logic and facts

Anyway, I really appreciate your efforts and time to solve this issue, at the same time I wish you all the best.

While I'm busy in my project I'll be checking your updates with much thankfulness to you,

Thanks again and have a great day.