An auxiliary development framework for lightweight RPG games based on Unity3D

Abstract

With the growing prevalence of virtual reality technology across industries like cinema, video animation, and gaming, game developers must cater to a wider range of players. Game engines serve as middleware, reducing the time spent on coding and improving productivity for creating video games. While mainstream game engines offer a plethora of customization options, certain developers may find themselves limited when it comes to controlling specific aspects of the game. Due to the lack of built-in functionality in current game engines like Unity and Unreal, the author developed TRPGFramework, a lightweight framework based on Unity3D, to address some of these problems. The game framework consists of two main parts: ZGamework (overall framework) and BGamework (game-specific framework). To enhance performance, scalability, and code reusability in the game development process, the entity-component-system structure is implemented. This approach increases maintainability and makes the code clearer, easier to expand, and debuggable. By creating a simple 2D RPG game for performance testing, we confirmed that the framework significantly improves code reusability and modularity, resulting in faster development time and increased efficiency for interactive applications and games. This framework is particularly useful for creating real-time combat role-playing games, which are some of the most complex games available today. Using entity-component-system principles, we developed a buff system and unit controller optimized to allow hundreds of intelligent units to fight on the same screen or thousands of non-intelligent units to fight simultaneously.