Tile base Farm Simulation in Unity

Question

I am thinking of creating a sprite base 2d top down farm simulation game. The game uses tiles and I was wondering (conceptually) what is the best way to handle the farm tiles. Each tiles should have the following list of features.

• The player should be able to add seeds to each tile

• The player should be able to plant a variety of vegetables.

• Plants should have different stages of growth

• The player should be able to interact with each tile (dig, cover holes, water, add fertilizer, etc).

• The farm layout can have a variety of shapes (i.e. Not just a square (9 x 9) or rectangle (9 x 15) a shaped farm.)

Currently I have a script that generates a square or rectangle shaped like farm, each tile is a sprite object with a 2D collider. I have come up with a solution for planting and the different stages of growth. However, it isn't the most elegant solution. My current solution is to create prefab for each plant. Then once a seed is planted onto a tile, create a plant object in the location of the tile (using it's vector position), and make the plant a child object to that tile. Each plant will have an age counter that increase when a new day is triggered. To show the growth stage swap the texture depending on the plant's age.

My biggest problem with the implementation is that if the players farm is very large the game will have to create a hundreds object, which seem very taxing. Is that a different way achieve these features without the use of so many objects? If so, how would I implement it (conceptual of course). Thanks!

Answer 1

As your game appears to use rectangular tiles; for any arbitrarily shaped farm, there is an optimised subdivision of that farm into rectangles. Often, far fewer than you'd think. So, for now, let's ignore your last requirement.

Second, you want to be able to have different images on different tiles depending on plant type and growth stage. From a graphics perspective, there is not really a difference between these two.

• Subdivide your farm into rectangles.
• Generate a mesh, such that each tile has 4 owned corner vertices.
• Set for the texture of the mesh an extended tilemap (as an image, not an actual unity tilemap), and manipulate vertex UVs to vary what each individual tile shows.
• For Collision, use a simple rectangle collider and then apply some relative coordinate math to determine the exact tile that is affected.

There, all one object per subdivision. Each of these steps can have some tricky components, but this should be enough to get you started. For huge maps, be sure to keep mesh vertex limits in mind.

Answer 2

I'm going to give you a rather stupid answer but what the heck. First of all hundreds of objects in a game is no problem. Secondly there is this guy called quil 18 that has great tutorials.

Start with the Basics of 2d tile maps and then you can watch this gigantic series about a base building game here