How to make an event happen only at the first start of the game?

Question

I want to know how to make something happen only once like a tutorial in a game which appears only when you first start your game and then when your game got saved to a further point it never appears again even when you close your game and start again.

I want to give players some amount of gold when they first got their hands on my game ... but I do not want to give them that again and again whenever they restart the game ...

So I want to know how to make something happen only once in a game application..

I hope you get my point ... thanks ..

Answer 1

You'll want to create some form of persistent data storage. Persistent data, if you're not familiar, is data that can be saved/stored on the hard drive for use in-between scenes, after the game/computer has been shut down, etc. In short, you're writing it to a file of some kind. More info on persistent data can be found here.

As Draco18s mentioned in the comments, your best bet is to store some kind of OfferTutorial variable in persistent data. By default, you'll have this set as OfferTutorial = true.

Once the user has completed the tutorial and earned the reward, you would switch this variable to OfferTutorial = false.

On load, simply check this variable to determine if you want to offer the tutorial to the user.

Answer 2

It is my normal practice in my every game. First I'd like you to add a small script named Utils.cs made by me that I do use in my every game. No such requirement but easy to handle these kind of stuff. Main benifit of this script is you can use bool in PlayerPrefs through int.

Utils.cs

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Utils : MonoBehaviour
{

    public static void SetInt (string key, int value)
    {
        PlayerPrefs.SetInt (key, value);
    }

    public static int GetInt (string key)
    {
        return PlayerPrefs.GetInt (key);
    }

    public static void SetString (string key, string value)
    {
        PlayerPrefs.SetString (key, value);
    }

    public static string GetString (string key)
    {
        return PlayerPrefs.GetString (key);
    }

    public static void SetBool (string key, bool value)
    {
        if (value)
            PlayerPrefs.SetInt (key, 1);
        else
            PlayerPrefs.SetInt (key, 0);
    }

    public static bool GetBool (string key)
    {
        int val = PlayerPrefs.GetInt (key);
        if (val == 1)
            return true;
        return false;
    }
}

Now in any script that runs only once per game launch (script in splash screen for example), you can handle very first launch like,

SplashScreen script

void Start()
{
    if (!Utils.GetBool ("isAppLaunchedFirstTime")) {
            Utils.SetBool ("isAppLaunchedFirstTime", true);
            //TODO: Set initial coins
            //TODO: Set sound flag to true
            //TODO: Set tutorial flag to true
            //TODO: Whatever you want to do only once
        }
}