ASTEROIDS - ARRAY

At this point the asteroids contained all the behaviors it should have had in the game. So I created a prefab of the 3 asteroids by dragging and dropping it down to my prefabs folder in Project window. A new empty GameObject was created in the Hierarchy (goto Hierarchy --> Right-click --> Create Empty)

We have 3 different sizes and shapes of asteroids in the scene. So, an Array was used to store the collection of asteroids.

DECLARING AN ARRAY OF ASTEROIDS

• When declaring an array we follow the similar procedure that we use to declare other variables. A data type is specified and a name of the variable is declared. To declare an array, the only difference is that we include a square brackets [ ] after the data type.

• In the SpawnManager GameObject, a new Script "SpawnManager.cs" was added to handle the random instantiation of asteroids. 

• Inside SpawnManager script, an array was declared with a data type GameObject to store 3 asteroid prefabs created.

INSTANTIATE RANDOM ASTEROIDS

• This section discusses on how the random (out of 3 prefabs) asteroids were instantiated at random x-position using asteroid prefabs' rotation.

RANDOM INDEX FOR ARRAY

• It is necessary to create a random index for an array so that every time the Game Object is instantiated, a random Index in fed into the code and random asteroid clone is created.

• For this, Random.Range(int minInclusive, int maxExclusive) was used. 

  • • This method is used to return a random int within [minInclusive and maxExclusive]

    • In this case, minInclusive number = 0, and 

    • maxExclusive number = Array.Length (Length of an array or number of elements stored in an array)

RANDOM SPAWN POSITION

• The random asteroids should spawn from