Items
The ItemFactory is a crucial part of the Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture within our game. It represents the properties and behaviour of an in-game item. Items can be anything from weapons, tools, plants, to any other interactable objects that players can use or manipulate.
To make items using the ECS approach, components are added to the entity. This modular approach allows shorter and less complicated code.
In the itemFactory.java a base item is shown below. With the default components added shown in green.
To extend this base item into a hoe, we need to add the relevant components to this Entity to make it a hoe. For example a hoe would have the following added components.
Ensure when writing your own constructor for items, that you use the provided base item constructor and then add your required components to this entity.
Arguably the most important component for an item, item component allows the item to tell other entities and bits of code what it is and how it should be treated. It has variables like selling price, it's name, a Texture of it's inventory sprite and a description. Most getters and setters are within this component.
Item actions allows items to interact with the ground and/or entities around the player. The most important part of setting up a Item to do something is to simply make a new value in the enum and add it to switch case in ItemActions.use() and then call a function when it is true to add in the item being used.
Very similar to ItemActions, head over to the player's animation controller and look at the function use, then customize it to correctly call the right animation when triggered. For more general animations like planting a seed it isn't necessary to have the string manipulation occuring currently so feel free to switch it to if else prior to make sure the correct animation plays.
ItemType enum is used to mark what it should do in various switch statements like in ItemActions or how to animate the usage of the item. Just add your own values to the enum, one for each different action or animation (for example each tool has their own since they all do different actions and animations).
In summary, the ItemFactory is a crucial part of our game's design, defining how in-game items work. These items can be things like weapons, tools, or plants that players can use. The factory uses a smart way of organizing things, making the game's code easier to manage.
To create new items, like a hoe, we start with a basic item and then add specific features to it. This way of building items lets us create a lot of different things in the game without making the code overly complicated. This makes the game development process smoother and gives designers the flexibility to create a variety of items for players to interact with.
Items being an Entity was a constant discussion within our team as it is not intuitive for them to be Entities. However keeping them under the ECS model increases the ease of use for other people using our code and since the are pseudo-entities (unregistered so they don't call update) they don't take up much CPU/GPU power. The other solution would be to decode and encode the item on pickup which would decrease the amount of size the entities take up. However this would increase the difficulty of making a new Item and this went against our original idea of how the Items should work. We tried to mitigate the issue of having entities stored by having a maximum of 30 entities in the inventory, as the inventory array only stored unique values and a HashMap was used to deal with count and position which reduced the load items have on the game.
