Abilities

Here we have a solution to represent character Abilities. They can be related to movement, attacks or other stuff.

Basic Abilities

These would be abilities considered to be the most basic and therefore you will need nothing but the abilitiy’s component itself to make it work. Just add into your character, tweak as you want and it will be ready to go.

The ability to flip or to perform basic movements are examples of basic abilities.

Learnable abilities

Through out a game Some abilities can be learned, unlearned, activated and deactivated depending on your game’s logic.

So, for the sake of organizing and allowing us to have multiple setups for abilities configurations, we use ScriptableObjects as setup for this kind of abilities. This way you can create multiple setups and use them in different situations along your game.

So, when configuring some learnable ability component, associate the correct setup with it this will grant the component to work properly.

Learnable Ability Setup

Every learnable ability setup have 2 main boolean properties wich will allow you to operate them as you wish. They are:

public bool Learned { get; }	This means your character has already learned that ability therefore can use it if it is active
public bool Active { get; }	This means the ability is active and can be used. This consider if ability is learned or not

We also have one UnityEvent<bool> for each of the above properties value changes updates:

public UnityEvent<bool> LearnedStatusUpdate	Invoked every time the learned property value changes
public UnityEvent<bool> ActivationStatusUpdate	Invoked every time the active property value changes

And these available methods:

public virtual bool Activate()	If Ability is learned, activates it and invokes active status update event. Returns false if activation fails
public virtual void Deactivate()	Deactivates the ability and invokes active status update event.
public virtual void Learn()	Sets ability learned status as true and invokes learned status update event.
public virtual void Unlearn()	Sets ability learned status as false and invokes learned status update event. This also calls Deactivate() to ensure the ability is not active.
public virtual void LearnAndActivate()	Learn and activate the ability. Perfect for when managing abilities like purchasing o collecting things that grants that ability.

These properties and events can be really handy for the case of building an ability manager. Say you want to handle when a specifc ability is considered learned (maybe buy purchasing it on store or picking up a collectable item). Just access the ability setup ScriptableObject through your script and call its Learn() or LearnAndActivate() methods.

Also, considering you may want to disable some ability temporally based on your game’s logic, but still want to display that particular ability as learned, use the Activate() and Deactivate() methods to handle this.

Have in mind that an ability crafted by us will only perform in case both learned and active are set as true. All abilities listed below will have their setups properly documented.

Note

Abilities setups are crafted to represent an specific character setup of abilities. So, if you have different characters with the same ability, this means you would probably want to create different ScriptableObject setups for each of them.