Today we’re going to learn how to create a nice border around the perimeter of an area in a hex map using Unity and a LineRenderer. Here I have it as a dotted purple line but you can make it look like anything you want with the flexibility of the line renderer!

An easy trap to fall into when you’re starting out in Unity is creating strings each frame in your update loop. Say you have score that can change from a bunch of things: eliminating foes, jumping on a block, collecting a ring, or just existing. Whatever floats your boat. Then in your score updater component you just do:

When the events we set up in part 1 of exploring the card language fire it would be quite nice if they could actually do something! This is where actions get their chance to shine. There are a ton of different actions a card can take but we’ll start out with just a few example ones like doing damage to pieces (Hit), healing them, or drawing a card. Just as we can have multiple events on a card we should also be able to have multiple actions for each event. We’ll also need a way to pass arguments to these actions to tell them which pieces to hit, what player draws the card, and so on.

When I was first starting the project that would become Solaria Tactics I knew that if you’re going to make a card game, you better make the cards easy to design and tweak. There’s going to be hundreds of cards each with special rules, conditions, actions and other crazy stuff I want to add. Designing all these cards and making sure they work as intended would be a big challenge then especially with a developer team of one. So the challenge was take a card description like “Deal 5 damage to all minions” and encode that into something the game engine can understand and execute when you play that card. I had heard games like Hearthstone have a custom editor tool for designing and setting up the cards which I briefly considered doing, but that seemed like a black hole of time to create and maintain. It then dawned on me that the problem I was trying to solve, “Create meaning out of text”, is exactly what languages (both computer and written) are meant to do. Brilliant! I would create my own DSL which I could customize fairly easily and get all the power I need out of it. This idea also really appealed to the CS nerd inside of me since computer languages are such great examples of recursion. We’ll be using a program to make a language which will then be used to make a program!