A fun exercise for practice juggling variable references — I have written about the usefulness of Linked Lists in the past. Today, I want to get into the mechanics of how a linked list works by creating my own implementation of linked list functionality. NOTE: Linked Lists are already implemented in C#. This exercise will duplicate that functionality, but…

Using Class Inheritance to Pull The Wool Over Unity’s Eyes — I recently watched a brilliant presentation on Game Architecture with Scriptable Objects from Ryan Hipple, where he demonstrated a useful pattern he calls the Runtime Set. It’s a useful way to keep track of all of the active objects of a given type in the scene. …

Creating reliable, reusable tests to aid rapid development — Recently I completed a challenge to rotate the elements of a matrix clockwise or counter-clockwise by 45 degrees. In other words, I needed to be able to make this:

From Brute Force to Formal Elegance — Here’s the situation: you’ve been hammering away at a complicated coding problem for a day or so and you’ve iterated your way into a working system. Mission complete, right?

Leveraging Linked Lists for Lightweight Loops — Welcome to part 2. The objective before us: take all the information we collected in the previous four articles (the initiative list, the turn list, the action lists) and use that data to move the proper pieces on the map in the proper sequence. The bulk of the process happens…

A Brute Force Solution to a Complicated System — Here’s the objective for today: create a system for recording and replaying multiple commands from multiple actors, where all actors first declare their moves in ascending initiative order, and afterward all moves are played in descending initiative order. There is a more elegant solution than the one I’m presenting here…

Handling Tactical Initiative Data Using Linked Lists — Today, the objective is to sort a C# Dictionary by the value property of each key/value pair, and then load that information into a LinkedList. This list will allow us to easily control who may act and keep the UI updated in the process. We’ll begin by declaring a LinkedList<KeyValuePair<Actor…

Creating An Event Driven System for Ordering Actors in Turn-Based Tactical Play with Unity 3D and C# — Here’s the objective: using Unity 3D and C# we want to build a system that can alert any number of actors to roll a random number, and report back their name and initiative number to be stored in a dictionary as key/value pairs. For the first part of this, we’ll…

Today we visit the scene of an emergent urban tragedy: a tremor has collapsed some pedestrian walkways, leaving a bystander trapped beneath the rubble! Luckily, we have a pair of heroes on the scene, ready to save the day. Thus the stage is set for today’s demonstration. From a gameplay…