Industrial Jones

Note that this is not a complete game (although it does come with a complete set of levels). Some final tweaking and bug fixing is required to actually make this work.

Lessons Learned

• When working with sprites, have a Sprites asset folder with a Tiles subdirectory. The sprite images (PNG, etc.) are going to be placed in the Sprites directory, while the tilemaps and tiles generated from it are going to be placed withing Sprites/Tiles.
• The Sprite Editor allows the placement of a custom "Physics Shape" that defines the shape of the collision polygon. To update the collision shape on tiles that are already placed, the collider needs to be disabled and re-enabled.
  • Instead of changing the physics shape to a rectangle in the sprite editor, it might make sense to set the sprite's collider type to Grid instead (from the default of Sprite).
  • The ladder sprite had its shape auto-generated and contained holes, which was fixed manually by removing some vertices from the shape polygon in the Sprite Editor.
• In the Editor, an Icon gizmo can be assigned to any game object In 2019.3.0b2 this is done by clicking on the icon next to the active/enable checkbox in the Inspector. In the screenshot above, the waypoints for the sawblades are using label icons as gizmos.
• Using different tilemaps for different purposes works pretty well: Background tilemaps don't use a collider, while "Ground" tilemaps can; tilemaps can be assigned to different layers for collision checks.
  • The "Hazard" tilemap used in this game is used for hazard objects such as acid/poison and spikes; it is on the "Hazard" layer and uses (composite) colliders.
  • The "Climbable" tilemap (on the "Climbable" layer) is used for ladders; tiles here have (non-composite) tilemap colliders that are configured to be triggers.
• Collisions with the hazard layer are checked by comparing to other.gameObject.layer in the OnCollisionEnter2D() method.
• Using a Rigidbody 2D with a body type of Static results in discrete collisions that can result in objects moving "into" the collider when they are too fast. Due to this, the player character can get stuck in the ground when falling. Switching the body type to Kinematic and setting the collision detection to Continuous (from the default of Discrete) fixes this issue.
• Portals are being used to teleport the player from one scene to another. In this case, PlayerPrefs are used to store the ID of the portal to move to, and the player is being spawned at the stored position upon loading of a scene.

Things to learn

• Right now, the invisible ladder top platform needs to be placed manually. This is an issue, because the tile is placed on the grid, while the platform is added manually afterwards. Apparently custom brushes can be used to automate this behavior, such that the platform would be added, whenever a ladder top is being painted.
• Right now, each scene duplicates the game manager, HUD, etc. Instead, investigating into additive scene loading may be worthwile.