Pokemon Unity Tutorial - BattleManager [Pt.8]

August 23, 2019

Unity Pokemon Tutorial

BattleManager

Youtube - Lets Make... Pokemon in Unity! - Episode 8 BattleManager Code

By: BrainStorm Games

This tutorial focuses on the scripting the actual functionality of all the UI in the battle scenes. This includes giving all of the different text selections their various functionalities when the player selects them during a battle.

The intial setup for the BattleManager script was a huge pain in this tutorial. It started with creating a bunch of public GameObjects and Text objects to provide input fields in the inspector. There were almost 20 different elements created at once here. Then, we had to plug in all of the corresponding UI Text and Panel objects from the last tutorial into these fields. Many of these objects were never renamed at all (or named poorly as the script name does not match the object name in any manner). This will be workable since this is not the main reason I am doing these tutorials.

After setting all of these, they set up a switch case which uses a newly created BattleMenu enum to determine which of these UI elements should be set active/inactive at any given time. This is all done in a ChangeMenu method that takes in a BattleMenu paratmeter. This method is called in the GameManager.

Then they setup a monster nested switch case in the Update method to give the illusion of the "cursor" moving around the different menu options. Every button press goes into this huge switch case that first determines which menu you are in, and then depending on that menu, determines which text elements it needs to change (since it only wants to change those on the currently visible menu). It then resets every text element to its initial string, while changing the current string by just adding "> " in front to look like a cursor is selecting it. The code for the menu selection is as follows:

private void Update()
{
if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.DownArrow))
{
Debug.Log("Down pressed and currentSelection is: " + currentSelection);
if(currentSelection < 4)
{
currentSelection++;
}
}
if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.UpArrow))
{
Debug.Log("Up pressed and currentSelection is: " + currentSelection);
if (currentSelection > 0)
{
currentSelection--;
}
}
if(currentSelection == 0)
{
currentSelection = 1;
}

switch (currentMenu)
{
case BattleMenu.Fight:
switch (currentSelection)
{
case 1:
moveO.text = "> " + moveOT;
moveT.text = moveTT;
moveTH.text = moveTHT;
moveF.text = moveFT;
break;
case 2:
moveO.text = moveOT;
moveT.text = "> " + moveTT;
moveTH.text = moveTHT;
moveF.text = moveFT;
break;
case 3:
moveO.text = moveOT;
moveT.text = moveTT;
moveTH.text = "> " + moveTHT;
moveF.text = moveFT;
break;
case 4:
moveO.text = moveOT;
moveT.text = moveTT;
moveTH.text = moveTHT;
moveF.text = "> " + moveFT;
break;
}

break;

case BattleMenu.Selection:
switch (currentSelection)
{
case 1:
fight.text = "> " + fightT;
pokemon.text = pokemonT;
bag.text = bagT;
run.text = runT;
break;
case 2:
fight.text = fightT;
pokemon.text = "> " + pokemonT;
bag.text = bagT;
run.text = runT;
break;
case 3:
fight.text = fightT;
pokemon.text = pokemonT;
bag.text = "> " + bagT;
run.text = runT;
break;
case 4:
fight.text = fightT;
pokemon.text = pokemonT;
bag.text = bagT;
run.text = "> " + runT;
break;
}

break;
}


}

There has to be a much better way to do a menu system like this. I'd imagine you would just want everything to be set into an array of some kind where the inputs just move through the array elements. Then you would just tie some visual representation to whatever UI element is currently selected. This just seems very frail, hard to read, and hard to edit.