How to make difficulty button option selection change spawn rate

Question

I'm trying to make my Unity mobile game Difficulty options button selections (Easy/Medium/Hard) function to change the spawn rate for enemy ai. For example, clicking on Medium should trigger spawn 2x as much ai across all levels/scenes.

I have the buttons working according to Console but the difficulty Button script is not communicating with the Spawn script properly since selecting a difficulty level is not influencing spawn rate.

Does anyone see what I'm missing? Have spent lots of time on this but no luck.

Difficulty Button Script:

public class DifficultyButton : MonoBehaviour
{
    private Button button;

    private RandomSpawn randomSpawn;
    
    public int difficulty;

    
    
    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        button = GetComponent<Button>(); 
        button.onClick.AddListener(SetDifficulty); 
        randomSpawn = GameObject.Find("Random Spawn").GetComponent<RandomSpawn>(); 
    }

    //click on diff buttons n Console will show they were clicked
    void SetDifficulty() 
    {
        Debug.Log(gameObject.name + " was clicked");
        
    }
}

Spawn Script:

public class RandomSpawn : MonoBehaviour
{
   
    public GameObject prefab1, prefab2, prefab3, prefab4;
   
    public float spawnRate = 2f;
   
    private float nextSpawn = 0f;
   
    private int whatToSpawn;
   
 
    public bool isGameActive;
    public void StartGame(int difficulty)
    {
        isGameActive = true;
        spawnRate /= difficulty;
    }
 
    void Update()
    {
        if (Time.time > nextSpawn) { //if time has come
            whatToSpawn = Random.Range(1, 6); // define random value between 1 and 4 (5 is exclusive)
            Debug.Log(whatToSpawn); //display its value in console
           
           
            switch (whatToSpawn) {
                case 1:
                    Instantiate(prefab1, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                    break;
                case 2:
                    Instantiate(prefab2, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                    break;
                case 3:
                    Instantiate(prefab3, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                    break;
                case 4:
                    Instantiate(prefab4, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                    break;
               
            }
         
            nextSpawn = Time.time + spawnRate;
        }
    }
}

Here's a pic of my difficulty button setup on Hard in the Inspector

Answer 1

I assume your issue is that the buttons are linked to your onClick, but then the onClick is not doing anything. As far as I can tell, the onClick you are setting up just has the Debug.Log, so I will try to help fix that.

public class DifficultyButton : MonoBehaviour
{
private Button button;

private RandomSpawn randomSpawn;

public int difficulty;



// Start is called before the first frame update
void Start()
{
    button = GetComponent<Button>(); 
    randomSpawn = GameObject.Find("Random Spawn").GetComponent<RandomSpawn>();
    button.onClick.AddListener(delegate{randomSpawn.UpdateSpawnRate(difficulty);});  
}
}

Random Spawn Class

public class RandomSpawn : MonoBehaviour
{

public GameObject prefab1, prefab2, prefab3, prefab4;

public float maxSpawnRate = 2f;

private float nextSpawn = 0f;

private int whatToSpawn;
private float spawnRate = 2f;


public bool isGameActive;
public void StartGame(int difficulty)
{
    isGameActive = true;
    UpdateSpawnRate(difficulty);
}

void Update()
{
    if (Time.time > nextSpawn) { //if time has come
        whatToSpawn = Random.Range(1, 6); // define random value between 1 and 4 (5 is exclusive)
        Debug.Log(whatToSpawn); //display its value in console
       
       
        switch (whatToSpawn) {
            case 1:
                Instantiate(prefab1, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                break;
            case 2:
                Instantiate(prefab2, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                break;
            case 3:
                Instantiate(prefab3, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                break;
            case 4:
                Instantiate(prefab4, transform.position, Quaternion.identity);
                break;
           
        }
     
        nextSpawn = Time.time + spawnRate;
    }
}

public void UpdateSpawnRate(int difficulty)
{
    spawnRate = maxSpawnRate / difficulty;
}
}

I am not sure if your buttons appear before the game, then you select the difficulty then click another button which calls StartGame(). Either way what I am doing now is directly setting your button onClick of the difficulty buttons to the delegate function UpdateSpawnRate() which will update your current spawnRate. I also changed the public variable of spawnRate to maxSpawnRate in case you change the difficulty multiple times or play multiple rounds. Having the max allows the now temporary spawnRate to relatively change based on the maxSpawnRate and difficulty variable.

Let me know if this code works, I type of solutions as a general direction to follow, not the exact answer. If you need more guidance on how to implement it or something in the code does not work, let me know in the comments.