In part 1 of this series I showed you how to set up Unity, creating a prefab for the tiles and added the first script for generating a grid of tiles. In this second part I’d like to make the grid interactive and enable the change of colors for the rows and columns in the grid.

Tile behavior

Lets start by adding a new C# script to the scripts folder. I named this script TileComponent and opened it in Visual Studio. In the script we’re going to add some properties to the tile. First we need an array that will contain the various colors of the tile. We also need to keep track of the current color. This integer contains the current index of the the tile. To make things a little easier when changing the colors in a row and column, I also added two integers that are going to contain these.

By making these properties public we can change them from the Unity inspector. I don’t want the row and column properties to be edited in Unity, but I need them to be public to be able to access them from another class. The HideInInspector attribute marks fields hidden from the inspector.

Let’s switch back to Unity to add a few thing there.

To get the the script attached to the tile, first select the tile in the project explorer. Than, in the inspector, click “Add Component” and go to scripts. Alternatively you can search for it.

I added 4 colors to the array by setting the size to 4 and selecting the 4 colors I like to use for the tiles.

To get the tile to show the color, we need a material. Let’s add a new material to the materials folder by right-clicking on the materials folder and selecting “Create”->”Material”. I named my material “TileMaterial”.

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Instead of using the default shader I want to use the “Unlit”->”Color” shader. This shader doesn’t have any other properties than the color.

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To add the material to the prefab we need to drag the tile prefab to the scene hierarchy, open the “Tile” GameObject and drag the “TileMaterial” onto the “TileGraphic”.

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Make sure the change is applied to the prefab by clicking on the “Apply” button in the inspector.

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You can safely delete the “Tile” prefab from the scene hierarchy now.

Before we do another test run, let’s switch to Visual Studio and add some more code.

I added a new private method called UpdateColor. This method looks in the children of the GameObject where the script is attached to, the “Tile”, and finds a component of type MeshRenderer. The MeshRenderer contains the material. The color property of this material is set to the current color of the tile.

The Start method is executed when the Tile is activated and sets the color to its initial color.

I also added another method, NextColor. This method increases the CurrentColor index, but makes sure it’s reset to 0 when it exceeds the number of colors. After this change the color of the material is updated too.

Interaction

The game won’t be any fun until there’s some interaction. I’d like to handle the click on the tile in the LevelController we created in part 1 of the tutorial. The LevelController has access to all tiles. I’m adding a callback from the tile that the LevelController is going to subscribe to. The field is called “Clicked” and is an Action with two integer parameters which will hold the Row and Column of the clicked Tile.

To handle the actual click on the tile we can add the OnMouseDown method. Unity will automatically call this method when a mouse down event occurs.

Just in case there’s nothing that handles the click I added a null check. If something is handling the Clicked action it is called with the row and column.

To get the Tile to register click events we need to add a collider in Unity. Select the prefab and click the “Add Component” button. Search for the “Box Collider 2D” component and add that.

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To get the color of the tiles to change, we need to keep track of the created tiles from within the LevelController. Let’s have a look at the code and go over the changes.

I changed the type of the “Tile” field to TileComponent. I also added a list of TileComponents to keep track of the ones created. In the Start method the list is constructed. I added a variable to hold the result of the Instantiate method in line 20. Because we added the Row, Column and Clicked fields to the TileComponent earlier we can set them here.

The TileClicked method contains some code that might look a little complex. I used the linq Where method to filter the list of TileComponents. I want all items where the row is equal to the row of tile that was clicked or where the column is equal to the column of that tile. I than convert the result back to a list to be able to use the ForEach method to go over the selected tiles. For every tile in the result I change the color the the next by executing the NextColor method.

One last thing before we can run the game. Because I changed the type of the “Tile” GameObject to TileComponent, we need to drag the prefab from the folder to property in the inspector in Unity.

You should be able to run the game now. Click around and the colors should change.

In part 3 we’re going to add some UI to show our current number of  moves.

There are various ways to develop apps and games for the Windows Platform. One of them is by using a great tool called Unity . Unity is a development environment and platform to build 3D and 2D games and interactive experiences. There’s a vast community of people creating, sharing and selling assets. The most awesome thing about Unity is that is has a free version you can use for your personal projects. It only shows a splash screen stating that the game is built with the personal version of Unity.

There are beautiful examples of games built with Unity (you definitely should look at the showcase ), but for now I’ll focus on getting started.

The game I’m going to build is a going to be a simple puzzle game, it will be a clone of Alien Tiles . I’m going to use Unity 5 and Visual Studio 2015, both running on Windows 10. The game will show a grid of tiles with a particular color. When the player clicks a tile the entire row and the entire column of the tile will cycle to the next color. The goal of the game is to get the entire grid to a specific color.

Setting up Unity

Let’s start by opening Unity and create a new project. I’m going to name my game “ColorfulTiles” for now. To have Unity preconfigured for a 2D game, I select 2D from the options.

Unity Welcome Screen

I also want to include the Visual Studio 2015 Tools Asset Packages, by clicking the Asset Packages button and checking the package “Visual Studio 2015 Tools”. And hit “Done” to close the package select window.

Asset Packages

Now hit “Create Project” to create the game and get going.

I won’t be going over the various panels of Unity in detail in this tutorial, so I can focus on building the game. But, let me know if you would like me to write a tutorial about the details of the UI of Unity.

When starting a new project in Unity I always start by creating a few folders: Scenes, Prefabs, Materials and Scripts. Depending on the game I’ll be building I might add other folders (for sounds, textures, etc.), but for now this would be sufficient. You can add folders by right-clicking the project panel and going to Create -> Folder in the context menu.

Folders

Graphics

Before I start on the level generator I would like to add the tile to the game. I do this by adding an “empty game object” to the scene, by right-clicking on the hierarchy and selecting “Create Empty” from the context menu. I rename this GameObject to “Tile”. Now the graphic itself could be anything from a 3D object to a sprite. In this first version of the game I use a simple quad. I add one to the “Tile” object I just created by right-clicking the “Tile” and selecting “3D” -> “Quad”. I renamed the quad “TileGraphic”. I added the quad to an empty GameObject to be able to change the graphic in a later stage without needing to change too much in the game. Scripts, translation and scaling will be done on the root object of the tile and not on the graphic. Actually, let’s change the scale of the “Tile” object to 0.9 on all axis. This way I can create a grid of 1 by 1 tiles and have a little space between the tiles.

You might be wondering why I add 3D object to a 2D game. The 2D game is actually still 3D under the cover. Just by configuration, like setting the Camera to orthographic for example, the 3rd dimension somewhat hidden and object don’t appear smaller when further away from the camera.

To make the tile reusable I convert it to a Prefab. A prefab is an object that is stored separate and can be reused easily. To convert the GameObject to a Prefab just drag it from the hierarchy to the Prefabs folder. The GameObject in the hierarchy should turn blue indicating it is a prefab.

Create Prefab

I delete the “Tile” GameObject from the hierarchy now. It should still be available as a prefab.

Generating a level

Time to write some code. To generate a level we need to run some code. I added a new C# script to the scripts folder, by right-clicking the scripts folder and selecting “Create” -> “C# script”. I named the script “LevelController”. Double-click the script to edit it in Visual Studio, which may take a few seconds.

Just a Moment

After Visual Studio opens you’ll end up with a class, inherited from MonoBehavior. This class contains two methods. “Start”, which is called when the script is activated and “Update”, which is called every frame.

The first version of the LevelController just generates a level when the script is activated. It does this by going through two for loops. The two integer fields in the beginning of the class define how many rows and columns the grid will contain. By making these public Unity will show them in the Inspector so these values can be changed design-time. The third field, “Tile”, will be linked to the prefab we created earlier.

Inside both for-loops the Instantiate method is called. This method instantiates a new version of the GameObject passed as its first parameter. The second parameter of the Instantiate method is the position of where the newly instantiated GameObject should be placed. It seems like a whole lot of math for such a simple thing. All it does is centering the grid to the world. The +.5f is added because the tiles are positioned based on their center and not the top-left corner as you might expect. The last parameter, the Quaternion.identity, is the rotation. In this case it basically means to use no rotation.

Make sure the script is saved before heading back to Unity.

In Unity the script has to be attached to something. Because there’s not much in the scene at the moment, I just attach it to the camera by dragging the script onto it. When you look at the Inspector you should see the script, with its properties in there. Last thing to do is to drag the prefab created earlier to the “Tile” property of the script. By now, the inspector should look something like this:

Inspector

If you were following along you should be able to test-run the game now. You can do this by hitting the play button at the top of the screen in Unity.

Running in Unity

If you haven’t already, this would be a great time to save the scene. Just hit ctrl+s and save the scene under the scenes folder by the name of “Main”.

Running as a Windows app

To run the game as a Windows app we’ll have to change the build settings. You can find the build settings under “File”->”Build Settings…” in the menu.

Build Settings

First, make sure the scene is in the build. You’ll probably have to add it by clicking the “Add Open Scenes” button. Next, set the Platform to “Windows Store” and click “Switch Platform”. Change the SDK to Universal 10. To be able to Run and debug from Visual Studio, check the “Unity C# Projects” and “Development Build” checkboxes. Keep in mind that this will create a C# solution with everything you need to run the game. If you are looking to buy hacks on online games, visit iwantcheats.net for more information. The scripts we’ve edited before are not C# files contained in this project, because they’re Unity scripts that happen to be C# (although they’re linked in there as well).

Hit Build to build the project. You’ll have to specify a folder to build to. I usually create a new folder called “WindowsStoreBuild” and choose that. You can open the solution in Visual Studio and run it from there.

Running as UWP App

And that’s it for now. In the second part I’m going to add the various colors to the tiles and probably make them clickable.

By default, the Visual Studio Android emulator sets its keyboard entry to the hardware keyboard attached to you PC. But it might be very useful when developing apps to work with the software keyboard on Android. In the Windows Phone emulator, you can use a page-up and page-down to enable and disable the keyboard. In the Android emulator you’ll have to change a setting in the OS itself.

To change the setting, got to the Android Settings and to Language & Input. Than select “Change Keyboard”.

Hit the switch to change the input method.

You’re good to go:

While working on a Windows Store app I noticed I was writing TypeScript interfaces to get some syntax checking and code completion on JSON data received from an external service. In C# projects I’m used to use http://json2csharp.com to get the C# classes for my JSON and than just deserialize it to those types. I quickly searched the web and realized there wasn’t a similar solution for TypeScript.

Solution

http://json2ts.com was born. You just paste a block of JSON code into the text area and hit the generate TypeScript button to convert the piece of JSON to a TypeScript definition with interfaces.

Using the site

To use the result in you application you’ll have to add a “.d.ts”  file (declaration files) and just copy/paste the generated TypeScript from json2ts in there. You may have seen these files before, like for jQuery or KnockoutJS. These files only contain a description of types and are very useful when used next to a Javascript Library (for a lot of these have a look at DefinitelyTyped), but there are useful on the JSON result of a external service too.

Let’s assume there’s some 3rd party service you want to use in you application that return the following JSON:

This result is stored in the “result” variable. Now you can type “result.date” in your code to use the date value. But, TypeScript can give use code completion and syntax checking in Visual Studio. When http://json2ts.com generates the interfaces for this piece of JSON it looks something like this:

You can see the relations between the various types. When you place this in a “.d.ts” file and reference this file in the TypeScript file you want to use the definition you get all the benefit of TypeScript.

Wrap up

The site isn’t tested very much and I’m pretty sure there are some bug in it. If you have a piece of JSON that isn’t converting properly, please send me an email ( ts2json@timmykokke.com ). If you have any questions or feature suggestion drop me a line too. I probably going to add some “advanced” features to set the module name and root object names.