Guide 9 — Commission Witch

Sylvia Lee

What you're building

A gothic-Halloween platformer. A witch takes an order, gathers ingredients across the level while avoiding ghosts, brews the potion, and gets a different ending depending on what she collected.

From the whiteboard in class: order received → gather ingredients → mix and recipe check. That's your loop, and this guide builds it in exactly that order.

Yours is the first guide where most of the work is creating assets rather than placing objects. You'll make ItemTypes and Recipes in the Project window, and the game emerges from how they're configured.

Time: about three hours.

1. Before you start

• Finish Guide 0.
• Read Guide B §B1 (player) and §B2 (managers).
• One new input action: Interact. See section 6.

2. Scripts you'll use

Core — Guide B
PlayerController2D · PlayerAnimatorBridge · Health · DamageOnContact · Checkpoint · RespawnManager · CameraTargetAssigner · SceneLoader · GameManager · AudioManager · HUDController · MovingPlatform · ParallaxBackground

Collectibles
ItemType · Collectible · CollectionTracker

Enemies (Tier 2)
FloatingEnemy · EnemyPatrol

Level & flags (Tier 4)
Door · LevelExit · ChoiceFlagManager

Interaction & endings (Tier 6)
Interactable · InteractionPrompt · EndingSelector · (optionally DialogueData + DialogueRunner)

Your signature mechanic (Tier 8)
Recipe · RecipeChecker

3. Create your ingredients first

Everything else references these, so make them now.

Right-click in Project → Create → GAME1303 → Item Type, once per ingredient. Suggested starting set:

That last one is your bad ingredient — the answer to the whiteboard question "are there bad ingredients?" is yes, and it looks almost like the good one. That's the point.

⚠️ Don't rename these assets later. The save system matches ItemTypes by file name. Renaming after playtesting silently orphans anything already collected.

Put them in Assets/MyGame/ScriptableObjects/.

4. Create a recipe

Right-click → Create → GAME1303 → Recipe. Name it CalmingDraught.

How grading works

When the witch brews, RecipeChecker decides between four outcomes:

Extras Allowed 1 is the interesting number. At 0 the player must collect exactly the recipe and nothing more, which makes greed actively punishing. At 3 they can hoover up everything. Start at 1 — enough slack to be forgiving, tight enough that grabbing every mushroom you see is a bad idea.

Make two or three recipes so different playthroughs want different ingredients.

5. Build the level

The witch

Guide B §B1, with Health Max 3 and Invulnerability 1.

The ingredients in the world

1. Empty GameObject NightshadePickup + Sprite Renderer.
2. Circle Collider 2D, Is Trigger ✓.
3. Collectible:
   • Item Type → Nightshade
   • Amount 1
   • Bob ✓
4. Save as a prefab. Repeat per ingredient.

Make the rotten toadstool look similar to the good one. A slightly different tint is enough. A player who has to look carefully is a player paying attention.

The ghosts

Your pitch: ghosts move around, but don't touch them.

1. Empty GameObject Ghost, Tag → Enemy, sprite.
2. Rigidbody2D — Gravity Scale 0, Freeze Rotation Z ✓.
3. Capsule Collider 2D.
4. Health — Max 1, Destroy On Death ✓ (they can't be killed in your game, but it avoids oddities)
5. FloatingEnemy:

6. DamageOnContact — Target Tag Player, Damage 1, Knockback Force 6.

Save as a prefab. Ghosts are obstacles with a schedule, not enemies you fight — which suits a gathering game much better than combat would.

Level furniture

• Ground on Ground with colliders
• KillZone under everything
• Checkpoints
• Camera per Guide B §B3
• Optionally a Door requiring an ingredient count, to gate a back area

6. The order board and the cauldron

First: the Interact action

Input actions asset → Player map → + → Interact → Button → bind E and gamepad South. Save Asset.

On the player

Add InteractionPrompt:

The prompt prefab: GameObject → UI → Canvas, set Render Mode → World Space, scale it down to about 0.01, add a TMP text child. Drag it into the Project as a prefab, then delete it from the scene. One of these serves your whole game.

The order board

1. Empty GameObject OrderBoard + a noticeboard sprite.
2. Box Collider 2D, Is Trigger ✓, a bit bigger than the sprite.
3. Interactable:

4. On Interact → drag the Cauldron in → RecipeChecker.SetRecipe, then drag your CalmingDraught asset into the parameter slot.

The cauldron

1. Empty GameObject Cauldron + sprite.
2. Box Collider 2D, Is Trigger ✓.
3. Interactable — Prompt Text Brew, One Shot ✗.
4. RecipeChecker:

5. On the cauldron's Interactable, On Interact → drag Cauldron → RecipeChecker.Brew.

Consume On Brew off while testing. With it on, a failed brew eats your ingredients and you have to re-gather to try again. Turn it on once the game works — it makes failure sting, which is the right call for the finished game and the wrong one while you're debugging.

7. The endings

1. Empty GameObject EndingSelector + the EndingSelector component.
2. Add three Endings. Order matters — first match wins, so hardest at the top.

Element 0 — the best ending

Element 1 — the middle ending

Element 2 — the fallback

One ending must have no conditions, or a player who matches nothing gets stuck.

Where the counters come from

RecipeChecker adds to brews_perfect, brews_passable and brews_ruined automatically on every brew. You don't wire that — you just read them here. That's how "different endings based on how many ingredients you collect" resolves without any new code.

3. Add a ChoiceFlagManager to the scene — the counters live there.
4. Make three simple ending scenes (a Canvas with some text is plenty) and add them to Build Settings.

8. The HUD

1. Canvas → three heart Images (Heart1–3) top-left.
2. A TMP text per ingredient you want counted, e.g. NightshadeCount.
3. Empty child HUD with HUDController:
   • Heart Icons: all three, plus Heart Full / Heart Empty sprites
   • Item Counters: one entry per ingredient — Item Type, its Text, Format {0}

A small icon next to each count makes it readable at a glance. HUDController fills the icon automatically from the ItemType if you assign one.

9. Wire it up

Row 8 is what triggers the ending. If you'd rather the game end at the cauldron instead of a level exit, wire RecipeChecker.OnBrewResult there instead.

10. First playtest

1. Walk, jump, take damage from a ghost.
2. Pick up an ingredient — the counter goes up.
3. Press E at the order board — the Console should show the recipe being set (add a temporary TMP text wired to RecipeChecker.OnFeedback to see messages).
4. Press E at the cauldron with nothing — you should get "Still missing: …".
5. Gather the exact recipe and brew — Perfect.
6. Gather the recipe plus three extras and brew — Passable.
7. Carry a rotten toadstool and brew — Ruined, regardless of everything else.
8. Reach the level exit — an ending scene loads.

Wire OnFeedback to a TMP text early. It gives the player (and you) an actual sentence explaining what went wrong, which turns brewing from guesswork into a puzzle.

11. Then add

1. More recipes and more ingredients. Your game's variety lives here, and it's all asset creation — no new scripts.
2. DialogueRunner so the order board says the request in the customer's voice rather than showing a bare list. Guide 10 §5 has the panel recipe.
3. Animation — Guide B §B6.
4. Door requiring an ingredient count, gating a harder area.
5. Ghost variety — one that wanders, one on a fixed path, one that follows a long slow route past the best ingredients.
6. ParallaxBackground — a gothic treeline. Very on-theme.

12. Design notes for your game specifically

The rotten ingredient is the best thing in your design. It turns gathering from "grab everything" into "look carefully" — one asset that changes how the player moves through the whole level. Make it visually similar but not identical, and put it somewhere tempting: right next to a good one, or somewhere that looks like a reward for a difficult jump.

Extras Allowed is your greed dial. It's the number that decides whether the game is about collecting or about collecting exactly right. I'd keep it tight. A witch who brings the apothecary a bag of random mushrooms should get a worse potion.

Ghosts as obstacles rather than enemies is the right call. Your witch gathers; she doesn't fight. Ghosts on fixed patrol routes make the level a timing puzzle, and that fits the fiction better than a combat system would. Resist adding an attack.

Your endings are already written by the counters. Because RecipeChecker counts perfect and ruined brews automatically, you can add ending conditions without touching gameplay — a "never ruined a single brew" ending is just one more entry with brews_ruined at 0. Cheap, and it rewards a way of playing rather than a score.

Three brews for the best ending is a good target. It means the player has to succeed repeatedly rather than once, which makes the second and third orders feel like they matter.

13. Common problems

14. Checklist

• Five ItemType assets, including one bad ingredient
• At least one Recipe with a Forbidden entry
• Interact input action added
• InteractionPrompt on the player with a world-space prompt prefab
• OrderBoard wired to SetRecipe
• Cauldron wired to Brew
• ChoiceFlagManager in the scene
• EndingSelector with three endings, fallback last
• Three ending scenes in Build Settings
• OnFeedback wired to a text so you can see what went wrong
• All eight events wired
• You can brew Perfect, Passable and Ruined on purpose