Programming

In the second part of this series, we will be exploring how to give our projectiles a nice vertical arc as they travel towards the target. This article will expand upon the work in Part 1, where we coded a projectile that could home in onto the target and detect collision with the target without using Unity’s physics engine’s.

If you’re developing a tower defense game, one of the first questions you are going to be dealing with is this: how do you make the projectiles that your towers fire hit their targets? After all, these fired projectiles take time to reach their targets – targets that are constantly moving. Sometimes, by the time a projectile gets to where it was aiming at, their targets would’ve sometimes moved out of the way.

A common problem I see in novice Unity game programmers is that they often create too much unnecessary, duplicate code. Take, for example, the programmer who creates a simple 2D platformer with a player character and a generic enemy character to be duplicated across the level. What often happens is that two separate scripts will be created — one for the player character, and one for a generic enemy character. Each individual script will define its own behaviours for things such as movement, jumping, dealing damage and receiving damage, and most of the code between these two scripts is similar because the character types have so much in common.