Advanced Unity Sushi

Setting Up Your Player Objects

When working with an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language, such as C#, you need to decide which objects you will be programming. Your game will have two players, so you need two player objects. These players will control two sprites that do the same thing. So, you can use a single class or struct as a template for both of these objects.

What is Object Oriented Programming?

Object Oriented Programming (OOP for short) is focusing on the objects that you will be programming.

An object is an instance (a single item that can be a copy of others) of a class. A class is a template and the object is the product.

Using the analogy of baking a cake, the class is the recipe and the object is a cake. You can then use that recipe (class) to make another cake (object) that have the same ingredients (variables), but they are two different cakes.

Classes or Structures?

When you create a template, you need to choose between a Structure (struct) or a class.

The most important difference is that a class is a reference type and a struct is a value type.

Basically, this means you can access a value in a class and change it, but in a struct you can only access the value.

You want to use a class because you will be changing different variables of the players.

  • To create a class, open the C# script named: “PlayerController”. Underneath the using statements and above the public class playerMover : MonoBehavior create your Player class by adding this code:
public class Player
{

}

Now you need to add the variables that will make up a player. These values are used by the StartingCodeForPlayer script to move the player and make animations.

  • Add the following variables to your class:
public string         name;

public GameObject     sprite;
public SpriteRenderer spriteRenderer;
public Rigidbody2D    rigidbody;
public Animator       animator;

public char           direction;
public bool           jumping;
public float          jumppower, movespeed, powerupTimeLeft;
  • Finally, add this constructor to the class:
public Player(string playerName)
{
    name = playerName;
    sprite = GameObject.Find(playerName);
    spriteRenderer = sprite.GetComponent<SpriteRenderer>();
    rigidbody = sprite.GetComponent<Rigidbody2D>();
    animator = sprite.GetComponent<Animator>();
    jumping = false;
    jumppower = 500.0f;
    movespeed = 2f;
    powerupTimeLeft = 0.0f;

    if (playerName == "cat")
        direction = 'L';
    else
        direction = 'R';
}

What’s a constructor?

A Constructor constructs (creates/makes) an object when you call the class. A constructor is a method (a function in a class) that has the same name as the class and it will set all of the variables for that object.

That’s it, you created a class! The “PlayerController” script will use this class to move the two different players.

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