The emphasis in this project was around making optimized systems for mobile development which is why we chose an event based approach as it minimizes unnecessary work and check each frame while still being comfortable to program in.

For us we only needed three events to run our core gameplay loop, this was OnPlayerMove, OnEnemyMove and OnPostMove, all called one after another with the queue being the player requesting a move.

Other gameplay mechanisms were able to tell the Event System to wait for longer as well, calculating travel time or maybe even a cutscene if needed. So first the event gets called then it takes the resulting “wait time“ which is the maximum of the recently received times to finish whatever animation or move or whatever you may have until then calling the next doing the exact same thing. The only time this gets cut of is OnPostMove where we finally unlock the players input and let them do another move continuing the cycle.

I think this system worked really well for Divers Descent and I think it made a lot of sense for the project.