Factors Factory

Ease and centralized your factors¹ management, retrieve them to get some player feedbacks/stats and serialized them for save/load game.

¹ A factor is a simple stack composed of unit objects which embed a value, an operation instruction and lifetime details. It can be used for Malus or Bonus factor, difficulty, ... >> more details in the What is a factor? section.

I've decided to make all the code I developed for my games free to use and open source. I am a true believer in the mindset that sharing and collaborating makes the world a better place. The thing is: I'm fulltime dedicated to my project and these open source plugins, for coding I need a looooot of coffee, so please, help me to get my drug 😝 !!

• 1. Requirements
• 2. Usages
  • 2.1. Many factors
  • 2.2. What is a factor?
    • 2.2.1. - UNIT
    • 2.2.2. - FACTOR
    • 2.2.3. - STATE
  • 2.3. When & Where? Ease of use
• 3. How does it work?
• 4. Getting started - a step by step guide
• 5. Contributing and Supporting

>> For developers:

• Developers docs

1. Requirements

• NansUE4TestsHelpers (free Editor plugins)
• NansCoreHelpers (free UE4 plugins)
• NansTimelineSystem (free UE4 plugins)

2. Usages

I used this to get a malus/bonus system, a difficulty factor and an xp counter,... sky is the limit!
The factors factory helps you to create any factor and update or retrieve it where and when you want.

2.1. Many factors

For instance in my game I needed:

• differents difficulty factors for AIMING ability and for a SOCIAL skill
• differents timeline for factors: some needs to work during the level process (eg "Oh player is drunk, for 1 minutes during the game session he should be affected! 😕 Alcohol ravages..."), others during the real life timeline (eg. "Hey bro, thanks to your fidelity, I give you 2 days of bonus on social interactions 😘"), etc...
• using the same simple UI to alter a factor

So basically a Factor as a name and it is attached to a Timeline and can be updated in any moment and everywhere.

Be aware of: When a timeline ends, all attached factors will be reset.

2.2. What is a factor?

In this plugin I categorized factor in 3 units of work:

2.2.1. - UNIT

The related class object is named FactorUnit.
This is what designers or developpers want to add on the fly as a factor's variator (or alterator).
Eg.

1. Player eat a rotten fruit = reduce the ACTION capacity's factor to 2 after 100 secs of digestion.
2. Player drink alcohol = divide actual factor by 4 on SPEECH capacity after 50 secs of absorption.
3. Player make a benevolent action = add a bonus of 10 on SOCIAL skill's factor.

A factor UNIT is basically composed of:

A Reason	A Value	An Operator	A Duration	A Delay
Is the Why this factor appears (can be used to send feedback to player, to make some stats,...)	What amount/degree of factor it is	How the value is computed with previous units in the same factor (or FactorUnit stack, see below)	Duration of this unit is applied (it is removed for computation after that but saved for stats or feedbacks)	To schedule the start before a unit applies
Using last examples:
1. eat rotten fruit	2	Substract (reduce = malus = the inverse of adding a bonus)	300secs	100secs
2. drunk	4	Divide	200sec	50secs
3. benevolent action	10	Add	2 days (you can convert in seconds... 😏)	0

2.2.2. - FACTOR

A factor is named (eg. ACTION, ELOQUENCE, REFLEXE, SociaL, WhatEver... you decide) to retrieve them easily.
As designer or developper you can create an infinite list of factors and add as many units you want.
All factors are created in project settings.
A factor relies on a timeline (configured in project settings too).
A factor is a queue of units, it saves them no matters their lifetime (for serialization, but not included for state computation) so you can use it to:

• sends reports
• gives feedbacks to the player afterwards
• save them on saved games

2.2.3. - STATE

This is the state of a factor at a given time.
Every time you ask to get a state, you will have a static state of the factor value, reasons list implied on computation (all units reasons reduce to get a unique reasons list), and the current time you asked for it (depending on the timeline paradigm).

2.3. When & Where? Ease of use

As a designer and a developper I wanted to:

Needs	What is my solution
Alter a factor in any moment and in every single part of the game (eg. Behavior tree, Blueprint, c++ classes,...)	1 single API entry point saved in the Game Instance
Don't have to use my brain too much...	3 mains blueprints nodes to manage all of this (create units & get factor's value).
Easily extend it later	Simple architecture in isolated plugins, use a bunch of interfaces (lot of extension possibility see Developers: How to override ... and a lot of tests/specs (see Developers: Testing section) to avoid regression.

3. How does it work?

To maintain a short doc here, please read this page here

4. Getting started - a step by step guide

To maintain a short doc here, please read this page here

5. Contributing and Supporting

I've decided to make all the code I developed for my games free to use and open source.
I am a true believer in the mindset that sharing and collaborating makes the world a better place.
I'll be very glad if you decided to help me to follow my dream.

How?	With
Donating Because I'm an independant developer/creator and for now I don't have any income, I need money to support my daily needs (coffeeeeee).
Contributing You are very welcome if you want to contribute. I explain here in details what is the most comfortable way to me you can contribute.	CONTRIBUTING.md