Question Suggestions on how to setup farming tilemap

Hi all,

Im working on a 2d farming game and wondered if im heading in the right direction with the way I am setting things up. I have a tilemap made up of game objects that each have a script on them that controls planting and crop growth and a character that fires a raycast at the tile underneath them to interact and do various actions.

My question is, is it best to store the logic on the tile? Should I have a timer on each tile for the crop growth and states?

Should this logic be stored elsewhere?

Sorry if this doesnt make much sense I am very new to C# but am pretty happy with what I have so far.

 

Yes. Don't bind the data (your model) into the presentation.

Lots of tutorials do this as a way to simplify and quickly set up a game and this is awesome for gamejams.

However it just doesn't scale long-term once any moderate level of complexity arises, or if you need to significantly change direction.

 

Ok so where should it go, where should the script be? on the player? on a tile manager?

 

That's not a thing, that's not how software engineering works.

Choices like the above are made in the full context of your entire project.

Choices made early on may need to be revisited as you develop your engineered solution.

You may wish to begin with some tutorials for similar game mechanics, farming games and whatnot. You will never be the first guy trying to do this, so learn from those before you.

Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:

How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:

Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That's how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.

Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don't make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!

If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.

Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.

Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.

Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there's an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.

Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!

Finally, when you have errors, don't post here... just go fix your errors! Here's how:

Remember: NOBODY here memorizes error codes. That's not a thing. The error code is absolutely the least useful part of the error. It serves no purpose at all. Forget the error code. Put it out of your mind.

The complete error message contains everything you need to know to fix the error yourself.

The important parts of the error message are:

- the description of the error itself (google this; you are NEVER the first one!)
- the file it occurred in (critical!)
- the line number and character position (the two numbers in parentheses)
- also possibly useful is the stack trace (all the lines of text in the lower console window)

Always start with the FIRST error in the console window, as sometimes that error causes or compounds some or all of the subsequent errors. Often the error will be immediately prior to the indicated line, so make sure to check there as well.

Look in the documentation. Every API you attempt to use is probably documented somewhere. Are you using it correctly? Are you spelling it correctly?

All of that information is in the actual error message and you must pay attention to it. Learn how to identify it instantly so you don't have to stop your progress and fiddle around with the forum.

 

Thanks for the advice, I fully understand what you mean with tutorials. Im not new to programming just gamedev in general and wondered if there was a best practise when working inside of unity.
I guess I just need to learn a bit more before asking silly questions

 

There are, but like any complex endeavor you kinda have to be able to do the basics before you can make complicated choices about things.

By analogy, if you are not already an airline pilot, it would not be useful to you to ask an airline pilot which lever he moves and how to move it in order to land the giant airplane. Anything he tells you would not be useful, except for perhaps broad things like "don't crash."

So like I said, do tutorials and try lots of different stuff, and pay attention to the effects your choices have, and you will begin to build a mental model of what gamedev and gamedev in Unity is like.