All content in this course uses:

Customize the health potions

In this tutorial, you’ll apply your previous learning to:

Write new instructions to increase the player’s health points (HP) 

Change the HP increase value to a public variable 

When you’ve finished, you’ll have written a custom effect for the health potions in the Creator Kit game!

Now you’ve explored the basic concepts of writing C# scripts for Unity, you can begin to script some gameplay!

So far, the potions that spawn at game start can’t be used in the player’s inventory. This is because the potions have no specific 

In this tutorial, you’ll write an effect for those potions so they give the player character an additional 

Customize the player experience

In this Creator Kit, there is a simple template script that you can use to write item effects. 

To create and open a new script from the template:

Enter a name without spaces (for example, “AddHealthEffect”) and select 

Assets/Creator Kit - Beginner Code/Scripts/ItemEffects

 script file to open it in your script editor.

Create and open a new script file

Let’s use everything you’ve learned so far to review the elements in this small script:

, with the same name that you provided for the effect. The dialog window added this for you. 

This new class is derived from another class called 

— this is a class written for this Creator Kit, which controls everything related to in-game items. It provides the common code required for these effects, and lets you focus on the specific features of your chosen effect.

Line 8 is the declaration for a function called 

 is a public bool type function. The bool variable type stores one of the two Boolean values: true or false. 

There’s an unfamiliar keyword in its declaration: 

. As its name suggests, the keyword is used to override the same function in the base class (UsableItem.UsageEffect). This enables you to write generic code that will work for any Use function.

When an object is used, this function will be called by the game and will execute all the instructions in it. It returns a bool value because the game will check whether the object has been used; if it has been used, it will be removed from the inventory. 

This functionality enables you to return false if the player is at full health, so the potion doesn't get used.

Review the contents of the template script

Now that the script exists in the Assets folder, it is compiled and part of your game code. This means that you can already assign it to the health potions in the game:

Assets/Creator Kit - Beginner Code/Prefabs /ItemDatabase

. This will appear in the Script field beneath. 

 field, add a description of the effect (for example, “Gives 10 HP”). 

This field appears because the base class has a description variable that it uses to fill the Inventory UI; since your effect is derived from this class, it also has the Description field.

 Add the effect to your health potion

 script and actually write the effect function!

Let’s review what the function needs to do and the tools available to you.

This Creator Kit has a special system to control the character’s stats called 

. A GameObject gains access to the Creator Kit 

 script is attached to it as a component.

To change the character’s health, you can use the

 function. This function enables you to change the health of a 

To change the health of the player character when they use a health potion, the effect function needs to:

 contained inside Stats, using a second dot operator.

 to declare how much health will be restored to the player character as the function’s parameter.

” instead of “return false;” — this item will be consumed and disappear from the player’s inventory.

Have a go at writing the effect function using the dot operator, then continue to the next step to see the solution. If you don’t feel confident doing this independently, you can continue to the next step to review the solution.

 Write the effect function

The effect function should look like this:

Check your effect function

Now try to change the health increase value to a 

. Use the following information to help you:

 —this means that it will be displayed as an Inspector field in Unity Editor.  

When you’ve had a go at making this substitution, continue to the next step to see the solution.

Change the health value to a variable

Your adjusted script should look like this:

Now you can edit this variable from Unity Editor:

field for the exposed variable below the Description field:

 to enter Play Mode and test your changes to the game.

Check your script changes

In this tutorial, you applied your learning from this project to:

Make the HP increase value a variable that can be changed in Unity Editor 

Congratulations — you’ve written your first C# code for Unity and completed the main Creator Kit: Beginner Code tutorials! 

You’ve completed the main tutorials in this learning project, but there's still plenty more to explore. 

The final tutorial is a reference guide for customizing the game using script templates we’ve created to go with this Creator Kit. You can use these to create a range of different items and effects.

Creator Kit: Beginner Code is just the start of your journey with Unity and C# Scripting!

Unity Version 2022.3