The goal of this case study was to improve the workflow of adding a character to the store. This workflow was 7 steps long, and is described in the PDF that came along with the case study.
The steps 3 and 5 have been replaced by an automated process, happening in the scene called CharacterPhotoShootBooth.unity. Using the CharacterPreviewCreator class, one can create a preview for a character by simply calling one static method. The style of the preview is also highly customizable. For example, changing the background color is as easy as changing the color in the render camera of the scene.
Instead of having a simple list of StoreItem in the Store class, it now also has a reference to a CharacterList scriptable object. This object holds a list of all the CharacterData objects to put in the store.
At runtime, the CharacterData objects are converted to StoreItems. I wanted to keep the way the store work as it is, because the StoreItem class seems to have a lot of uses in the code, and that way the store can still be used for things other than characters (like SFXs, stages...). That is why the store items list still exist, it is just now empty.
Using this structure, one can simply delete a character by opening its associated character data asset, and clicking the delete button.
To create a character, one can simply open the character creation window, by going in the top menu and clicking "Character Creator" > "Open Window". In there, they would simply specify the name of the new character, its price, and the FBX file to create the character from. They would then need to add the different materials they want to apply to the model, and click "Create Character".
The window will then create a prefab for the character from the FBX file, create a preview using the photo booth described above, create a character data structure populated with the specified information, and add it to the character list. By doing so, the character will be directly available in the store.
Once the FBX file is given to the window, the material model will be requested. One can click the "Open Material List" button to have access to all the Toon/Lit materials in the project. I set this filter because it looked like it was the style of the game, but this can easily be modified.
The first step in the previous character creation workflow was for the game designer to add the name and the price of the character in a spreadsheet. I added a "Character Creator" > "Export Spreadsheet" menu, to create a CSV file containing the names and prices of all the characters in the game.
I do not know what the spreadsheet is used for, and if this spreadsheet is used frequently, we may want to change the code to have it constantly updated in the project.
The character creator references a lot of elements, so I created an object called CharacterCreationParameters, to centralize these references.
THe character creation window creates 3 different type of assets: prefabs, CharacterData assets and previews. I decided to put them in 3 different folders. To do so, I used FolderLocators, which are just scriptable objects with an associated ID, that can be specified to a static method to get the folder path.
The character creator has to interact with a couple of other assets:
- The "character logic" prefab, which is a prefab common to all characters. For now it contains only the capsule collider, but it can later be used to hold other things, like an audio listener for example.
- The character animator controller, which is also common to all characters, and is added to the model when creating the prefab.
- The photo booth scene, because the path to the scene needs to be stored somewhere.
I added here a couple of options for the spreadsheet export feature:
- Whether or not all the character should be included to the spreadsheet. If this value is false, then only the characters in the character list will be added. This is here to be able to hide "in progress" characters, for public communication for example.
- What separator to use in the CSV file. This can seem like a minor feature, but it can greatly increase work speed, especially since changing separator settings in excel can be really tedious.
It is quite simple, but I added a debug system where keys are liked to UnityActions when playing in the editor. This allowed me to link a key to a "skip mode" in the player controller, to not collide with enemies and go way faster, to test the game's win state.
When testing the game on my phone, the names and prices of the characters were not displayed. This was because the font size was too big for my phone screen. In my opinion, the cleanest way to fix this would be to use TextMeshPro instead, with their adaptative font size function.