February 17, 2019
Tower Defense Tutorial
Episode 17 – Game Over
Youtube – How to make a Tower Defense Game (E17 GAME OVER) – Unity Tutorial
By: Brackeys
Ep. 17
This tutorial deals with creating the Game Over screen as a series of UI elements.
We started by adding a gameObject to our OveralyCanvas titled GameOver. This gameobject will hold all of the UI elements dealing with the game over state: new panel, text objects, and buttons for retry and menu.
We changed the OverlayCanvas scaling to “Scale with Screen Size” and used the slider to dictate that it would go by the height of the screen to scale our overlay UI canvas.
For scripting the game over scenario, we decided to expose the gameEnded bool variable to make it easier for everything to know when the game was over. This is useful for basic things such as disabling game inputs on the game over screen. We exposed it by making it a public static bool (and also renaming it to GameIsOver).
Making GameIsOver a public static variable however means it carries over from scene to scene, retaining its value, so we need a way to reset this value. This is easily solved by setting the value of GameIsOver to false in the Start method of our GameManager, as the Start method is called every time a scene begins.
To better organize our objects and scripts, the GameOver game object containing all the game over UI objects also holds the GameOver script. This script will handle everything during the GameOver phase of the game. This works by having the entire GameOver object disabled, and then the GameManager enables it when the GameOver state is reached. At this point, the GameOver object has an OnEnable method in its script, which acts like Start, but occurs when the object is enabled. This begins all the processes needed to be handled during the GameOver phase.
Finally, we wanted to add some animations to our game over screen. We used a basic approach to fading the UI objects in, with some minimal movement and scaling of text/buttons. There was a suggested easy way to fade in UI objects. If you add a “Canvas Group” component to a UI element, it has an alpha value directly tied to it that effects that entire object. This makes it very easy to fade objects in/out by just varying this value from 0 – 1.
SUMMARY
- Have your GameIsOver as a static bool to make it easier for every script to access this to basically shut down during the game over state
- Group your Game Over scripting into a single objects that starts OnEnable to keep things organized with minimal references needed
- Use Canvas Group components on UI elements to easily change entire alpha value (good for fade animations)
- Offsetting your UI animations can make the screen feel more organic/less robotic