Making levels based game

rushk01

Hi

If a game has multiple stories/adventures that can be purchased/downloaded separately in any sequence and one story has nothing to do with another, that is nothing is carried over from one story to another, but they are all part of one single app, then how should this be made in AC

Should the inventory menu be used to make a story selector screen ? 

And variables be used to track progress within each story?

ChrisIceBox

Variables are the best way to track a game's progress.  If you have multiple independent stories, then I'd recommend giving such variables as generic names as possible so that you can recycle them.

Inventory items can be categorised so that they can be made to appear in certain menus only.  This way, you could feasibly use them as a "story selector" while still having regular item usage.  As this would be directly tied to the purchase/download of sequences, however, I'd instead suggest approaching that with custom scripting.

rushk01

Should of these independent stories be separate AC Projects? 

They are self contained stories , available as in app purchases, to be played within the same  ios/android app and will be released at different different dates. 

So the main story selector scene should be 1 project

Story 1 = Another AC project

Story 2 = Yet another AC project

And have a custom script to find out which story has been bought or not,  and within each story what is the scene I am on.

When i click on a the story selector scene, can I have it reference the story 1 or 2 or 3 etc which are all separate AC Projects?

Sorry for a basic question but just can't figure this one out.

ChrisIceBox

I don't see a need to have a separate project for each story - and I'm not sure how you'd even switch between them save for running a separate app for each.

Better to just have each story as an asset bundle, with its own scenes, assets etc.  If you refer to scenes in AC's Actions by name, then you should be able to have them dynamically added to your "scenes in build" without causing any problems.

Actually getting the asset bundles downloaded and installed would be part of the custom IAP-handling script, but once they're in AC should be able to work with them as normal.

rushk01

Ok so 1 project that makes sense to me now.

What does dynamically added mean?

I read about asset bundles.

But one more question, if I want to release additional levels without having users update the app, then will will these bundled AC scenes be allowed by app stores. 

I will get coding help regarding IAP, checking if any new levels have been released but since these are entire scenes bundled together is it possible to do so? I read that asset bundles cannot contain scripts. Will each new story with all its scenes bundled together contain scripts? 

 

ChrisIceBox

By "dynamically added", I just mean scenes being added to your game by the importing of asset bundles.

Whether or not bundles are allowed in app stores is too general a Unity question for me to answer, as I'm not knowledgable enough.  But AC should allow for these method if you can get them to import separately.

Asset Bundles can't contain scripts, you're right, but AC scripts won't need to be included since they'll be in the main build.  What you would have to do is "pre-empt" the need for any custom scripts so that any custom scripts you need for any of the stories are already present in the main build.

rushk01

What you would have to do is "pre-empt" the need for any custom scripts so that any custom scripts you need for any of the stories are already present in the main build.

There is one custom script in my game that you had written for me , I am using this in all the scenes.

http://adventure-creator.wikia.com/wiki/UI_Text_labels_-_custom_Action?venotify=created

How do I make it so that this is only required in the main build ?

ChrisIceBox

We're getting into general Unity knowledge here, but if it's used by any scene that's listed in your default build settings then I believe you should be fine to use it in scenes that are present in asset bundles.

If you need to, you can create a "dummy" scene that has the script in it, even if the scene isn't loaded by the game.

rushk01

Ok thank you so much!