A Well Oiled Machine — Modular Systems in Unity

Modularity is defined as: “The degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety”

It’s time to expand upon the powerup system, but rather than utilize repeating “if” statements, we can deviate to a switch statement.

A switch statement is used to hold lists of possible outcomes efficiently. In the case of the powerup system, a switch will let us make 5, 10, or 100 powerups with relative ease.

Switch statements are started by using the keyword “switch”.

Inside of the parentheses we can identify a variable that we want to switch between. I made a new variable: powerUpID.

Inside of the Powerups script.

Now switch statements are full of cases. Cases are the logic that will run for each possible outcome of the switch statement. An easy example you could use this for would be a treasure chest with 5 possible items inside of it. You could use a switch statement and make a case for each of the five items, then have one selected by a random range value.

The odds of a bear with a gun being in a chest are always low, but never zero.

Here is what a singular case looks like:

This is activated my previously written tripleshot powerup. See my previous articles for how to set that up.

All switch cases must have a “break”.

This is the diction that tells the statement that the case’s logic is over and it can then receive more cases, or that the entire switch statement is done.

The entire switch statement, in this case held inside of OnTriggerEnter.

Cases start on 0, so the third possible outcome is actually case 2. Right now, case 2 is just a placeholder for future logic, but we could keep making more cases by continuing the pattern.

Case 1 is running a new function from the player script that speeds up the player for 7 seconds when they collect a new powerup. It was implemented the same way as the triple shot (see previous articles).

Another modular system to inspect are arrays. Arrays are variables that can hold multiple values. This is very useful for our spawn manager, as we can make a new variable of type Gameobject and make it an array named powerups;

Square Brackets mean this is an array.

When you make an array (and it is public) you can edit it in Unity!

Set the number of values, then add them to the array’s list!

Finally, let’s change the spawning logic so we don’t just get triple shot powerups.

I set a new integer variable inside of the SpawnPowerup coroutine named “randomPowerup”. This is set to a random range between 0 and 2.

NOTE: When using random range for arrays, you need always have the higher value be 1 more than the possible outcomes. In this example, only two possibilities can ever spawn.

Then, I instantiate a new gameobject (newPowerup) that is grabbing the randomly selected powerup, and finally placing it inside of a container for organization.

Let’s see it in action!

Both powerups spawn randomly, and both give the intended effect!