Match3 example game

How to test

Open MainScene.scene and press 'Play'. Game was optimized for mobile portait mode so it will look best with a landscape aspect ratio.

Description

A simple game to demonstraite a clean and robust architecture for the match-3 game which can be easily extended with any extra functionality. Uses a hybrid architecture - as foundation I use MVC-like architecture based on Zenject with Command pattern, but for match3 mechanics I used Unity DOTS Entity Component System as it works very well with this kind of logic.

Built with Unity 2020.1.13f

Funcionality

Has base match-3 mechanics and different levels. All levels and settings could be setup as Scriptable Objects.

General structure

• Uses very simple MVC/MVP architecture and Command pattern for main application logic
• Uses Unity DOTS Entity Component System for match-3 gameplay mechanics.
• Uses Zenject of inversion of control and dependencies injections
• Uses SignalBus from Zenject to decouple communication between different classes
• Implemented a custom State Machine to switch between global states (Boot -> LevelMap -> GameBoard) with a support of more complex State Charts
• Same State Chart is used to flow through match-3 states with a State pattern (PlyaerTurn -> Swap -> MatchesDestuction -> etc)
• Implemented a simple Pooling class for optimizing board gems usage
• Scripts/Core folder holds all core funtionality (Main state machine, Main Context installer)
• Scripts/Features folder holds feature related logic

Main classes and their descriptions

Models

• Is Plain C# class
• Holds application state
• Injectable into Presenters, Commands and Services (in case of adding backend). Not injectable to other models.
• Usually doesn't have injected dependencies
• Serialiazable for both sending to the backend or to be saved on the device

Views

• Is Subclass of MonoBehaviour
• Can have references to a group of View Elements and child Views that share the same purpose
• Listens to user input on the view elements and forwards them to the Presenter
• Not injectable
• Doesn't have injected dependencies

Presenter

Has references to Views

• Listens to changes in Models and updates the Views it is responsible for
• Has injected dependencies to Models, SignalBus, and Services.
• Listens to user inputs passed from the views or directly and executes commands

Configs located in Config folder

• Is a ScriptableObject assets
• Gets serialized
• Holds static information of the objects which doesn't change such as levels, how much score points for different matches to give, etc

Signals

• Is Plain C# class
• Used to notify other parts of the system of models updates or to execute a command

Command

• Is Plain C# class
• Micro controller responsible to execute one action and update all necessary models based on result of this action

DOTS Components

• Data container for ECS systems

DOTS Systems

• Base on archetype of entity will execute some data changes to components and can notify about them via signals.