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Unity Amiibo Clone
Hi! I'm wanting to work on a project that implements a system similar to the Nintendo Amiibos; specifically for adding new characters / items / objects into gameplay.
I'm not super familiar with the coding techniques that official Amiibo products use to implement this same thing, though. I know that the NFC tags they use can't store much at all; so I'm not entirely sure what method they use to import entire characters into gameplay. I'm inclined to believe that they have some small bit of code to them that unlocks a character that has already been implemented into the completed game's code? Or am I totally of the mark here?
Can anyone provide any insight in how official Amiibos actually achieve what they do from a programming standpoint?
Answer by srylain · Jul 01, 2018 at 12:18 AM
Think of it like how DLC unlocks used to work, the unlock key is extremely small and just relates to whatever character it's supposed to and the game itself already has the files necessary for that character (models, textures, animations, etc). So whenever an amiibo is scanned, it just picks up the character code and the game knows what character to spawn in. Same goes for other Toys 2 Life games like Skylanders.
There's probably a small but decent chunk of rewritable memory used for saving stats about these characters (like saving Skylanders progression), but it's probably really small and amiibo's are said to have under 8KB.