What is the best way to encapsulate inherited fields in Unity 2D?

Question

I'm currently designing a Unity game, and I want to ensure I'm implementing proper encapsulation. However, I'm stuck on this problem:

Suppose I have a class Item with the field: private string itemName . I also have a class Strawberry that is a subclass of Item . I want to write a method in class Strawberry that returns its itemName.

These scripts are MonoBehaviour, so they cannot contain constructors that would solve the problem above using base in its constructor.

What strategy should I use to set the Strawberry class' name?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to make your itemName string protected. That means it can be accessed by child classes.

Item base class:

using UnityEngine;

public class Item : MonoBehaviour
{
    protected string itemName = "itemBase";
}

Strawberry class:

using UnityEngine;

public class Strawberry : Item
{
    // Start is called before the first frame update
    void Start()
    {
        Debug.Log($"my mane is: {GetItemName()}"); 
    }

    string GetItemName() => this.itemName;
}