This week I started implementing some base systems for the prototype; I knew that for sure I had to have Units, be able to Buy them and be able to Move them on them Board.

Units

For the units I made a simple scriptable object containing all the necessary information (stats, mesh, etc. etc.) so that I could easily create new classes from the editor. I only put some basic stuff in this class and then Derived two more classes, one for the player Units and one for the enemies.

Buying Units

Once I had something to buy I made a very quick shop UI, and scripted the shop. It simply has a list of “Classes” (the player unit class) and it picks one at random for each slot. When the player clicks the button, it spawns a prefab, assigns it the Class script and call an init function to set the mesh, and show it.

Here I made sure that the units could only be spawned on a free bench slot (if there is one), but I’ll go into more detail in a second.

At this point I’m also preparing for the AI, I already have set up a nav-mesh and the NavMeshAgent on the Unit prefab; and here I encountered a small problem, where just spawning the unit, even if technically it was on the navmesh, would give an error. I had to start the spawning with the navmeshAgent disabled, explicitly check for the closest point on the navmesh to where I want to spawn it, spawn the unit at that position, and only then enable the NavMeshAgent component.

The board

Before going into the “moving the units” part, lets talk about the board. The board is made of two half-boards; each half-board is comprised of 32 tiles (in a 4x8 grid), each tile has the mesh and a tile script, to keep track of which unit is where (which, among other things, is used to both deploy the enemy boards given a position of each unit and to move the player units to their position after a fight).

Moving the Units

And now for moving the units; it’s quite easy: on the unit script I check when it’s getting clicked on, when it does it saves its current position and disables the gravity. Then I have an OnDrag() function, when it gets triggered it gets from the player controller the position of the tile the mouse is hovering and sets itself at that position plus a vertical offset. When I let go of the click it re-enables the gravity. So now the units moves and snaps to the grid, one small issue I was facing was that I could drop multiple units on the same board tile. I knew I wanted the interaction to be that the two units swap position, so I just make a physics check on the click release to see if it overlaps another unit, if it does it calls a Swap() function passing it its own previous position and… Done!