Victory or Defeat: Win and Lose Conditions

Now that we have a basic gameplay experience, it’s time to make the game end with the outcomes of winning or losing. One common way to implement this is through separated components with the responsibility of overseeing a set of objects to detect certain situations that need to happen, such as the player’s life becoming 0 or all of the waves being cleared. We will implement this through the concept of managers, components that will manage and monitor several objects.

In this chapter, we will examine the following manager concepts:

• Creating object managers
• Creating game modes
• Improving our code with events

With this knowledge, you will be able to not only create the victory and loss conditions of the game but also do this in a properly structured way using design patterns such as Singleton and Event Listeners. These skills are not only useful for creating the winning and losing code of the...

Creating object managers

Not every object in your Scene should be something that can be seen, heard, or collided with. Some objects can also exist with a conceptual meaning, not something tangible. For example, imagine you need to keep a count of the number of enemie­s: where do you save that? You also need some place to save the current score of the player, and you may be thinking it could be on the player itself, but what happens if the player dies and respawns?

The data would be lost! In such scenarios, the concept of a manager can be a useful way of solving this in our first games, so let’s explore it.

In this section, we are going to see the following object manager concepts:

• Sharing variables with the Singleton design pattern
• Sharing variables in Visual Scripting
• Creating managers

We will start by discussing what the Singleton design pattern is and how it helps us simplify the communication of objects. With it, we will create...

Summary

In this chapter, we finished an important part of the game: the ending, both by victory and by defeat. We discussed a simple but powerful way to separate the different layers of responsibilities by using managers created through Singletons, to guarantee that there isn’t more than one instance of every kind of manager and simplifying the connections between them through static access. Also, we visited the concept of events to streamline communication between objects to prevent problems and create more meaningful communication between objects.

With this knowledge, you are now able not only to detect the victory and loss conditions of the game but you can also do it in a better-structured way. These patterns can be useful to improve our game code in general, and I recommend you try to apply them in other relevant scenarios.

In the next chapter, we are going to start Section 3, Elevating Visuals, Effects, and Audio of the book, where we are going to see different...