Ladders, Buy Items from Shop, Ore Health Regen

After giving the player the ability to dig down, there was no way back up. This needed changing and to do so, I added ladders. Getting the functionality right for these was tricky, and they still didn’t end up perfect and will need further tweaking down the line. One of the issues I have with them at the moment is that they can be placed almost anywhere, as long as they aren’t on top of another ladder. This means that they aren’t correctly aligned with the world space, which is something that I will look to improve later down the line. For now, they have functionality (mostly) as intended, and fulfil their purpose.

The Ladder uses a box collider that, when colliding with the Player, will trigger a variable to true which allows the Player’s movement to be changed. Once this happens, gravity gets disabled on the Player’s rigid body. For these ladders to be implemented into the game however, they need to be purchased from the shop. This means that the buy menu required setting up.

Setting up the buy menu was much easier than I thought it would be. All I had to do was create a list, which I could then drag items into it from the inspector within Unity. I had a choice between using scriptable objects or prefabs. In this case, seeing as different items would need different data, I chose to use prefabs.

Something I wasn’t happy with was the interaction with ores. After mining them, but not to the point of being destroyed, they would remain on the health that they got down to indefinitely. This meant that it was constantly in one state or another, resulting in many ores being cracked at once. This interaction just didn’t seem to suit the game, so to change I added in a system that regenerates health should the player stop mining.