Programming for Shadow Puppeteer

Today’s post is by our Programmers, Nuno and Øyvind, and is a short introduction to how they work when coding Shadow Puppeteer.

Hey. This is the programmers speaking. We’ve taken over the blog for today, and we are going to enrich your lives with the joys of programming.

Just to catch you up to speed for those who don’t know, Shadow Puppeteer is being developed in the Unity 3D engine, where we are using C# as the main programming language (out of the three supported ones).

So, some of you might be asking, what does the programmer actually do?

Basically, we take the ideas, concepts and features that the Shadow Puppeteer Team want in the game, and implement them (to our best ability). In order to achieve that, we have to spend a long time writing the code necessary, and an even longer time debugging it in order to make sure it’s working.

A small sample of the code we’re using for the levers in the game, and
illustrate how the coding environment looks like.

One of the things we try to achieve when possible is making the code we write as dynamic and reusable as possible, in such ways that the level designers get the possibility of experimenting by combining different scripts in order to create new gameplay features.

An example of different scripts (as components) used within one of the
levels. This lever is manipulating the positions of two objects, and
toggling a light, by connecting the buttons script (screenshot above)
with two other custom-made scripts.

With Unity, being able to modify scripts for testing and experimentation is made easy, as the editor is capable of showing values of the code that you might want to tweak. So if you want the players to jump twice their default height, run faster or perhaps be 20 meters tall, these things can be easily made possible through this.
In short, programming gives you the tools to make most things possible.

We hope that by now you’ve learned a bit about what programmers do, perhaps in the future we might go a bit more in-depth into the mechanics of how Shadow Puppeteer works. And if you have any questions, we’ll try our best to answer them in the comments.