5 Things You Can Do To Make Games Like A Pro In Unity

it's no secret that making video games is both time consuming and expensive as games have gotten more technically advanced and consumer expectations have grown so have the budgets and resources required to meet those expectations if you're looking to make games commercially productivity dedication and a smart schedule are important to getting a game shipped on time and on budget and whether you're working alone or on a team you don't want to be making more work for yourself or one another that's just counter intuitive so there are a few things you can do to keep your projects organized keep yourself and your team motivated and make the process easier for everyone involved hi there i'm matt and welcome to gamedev guide i strongly believe in the adage of work smarter not harder so in this video we're going to take a look at five ways to work like a pro with unity and give yourself your team and that game idea of yours a fighting chance for the marathon that is game development so let's jump straight into it with our first entry on the list this should come as no surprise to you when i say that a good plan goes a long way somewhere tangible for you and your team to regularly make notes provide documentation create schedules and iterate on design can be an invaluable asset to a production especially when you're starting out and gathering ideas so use a planning tool and as games aren't a rigid thing that you plan once and execute on you want a planning tool that's going to support the ever-changing nature of game development and help you organize the chaos miller note are the sponsor of this video and their tool is an ideal solution to organizing said chaos they work differently than a lot of the other planning software that you've probably heard of and the tool is more like working on a wall within a studio allowing you to collect inspiration plan out designs develop ideas and list tasks all in one place their interface is intuitive and flexible allowing you to drag drop and arrange things in whatever way makes sense for you for me one of the most valuable things to do when planning a project is breaking up the design into development tasks and moving items across as i go through them a lot of the studios i've worked with plan tasks this way and middle note is ideal because the card functionality is built in natively and can link to other boards and boards can be a private place to think or a shared workspace for your team so you're in total control of who sees what millernote helps you organize the complexity of designing a game with ease it's free to use with no time limit the link is in the description below to sign up [Music] one of the key things i like to do from the start is organize my scenes while prefabs are definitely valuable and share a lot of the same benefits having multiple scenes for different parts of your game assets is a life saver especially when working in a team and using source control a multi-scene workflow basically involves breaking your game up into logical chunks such as ui lighting art and gameplay code and then in play mode either combining them all together or moving them dynamically into a runtime scene i've worked on multiple projects with teams in multiple engines and a multi-scene workflow is one of the shared traits across them because it allows different members of the team to work on the same area of the game at the same time so for instance i can be programming game data and an artist can be messing with the environment lighting at the same time as me without either of us creating conflicts or creating merging issues in source control it definitely changes the way you think about structuring your project but ultimately by breaking scenes down into different chunks you save a lot of headaches in the long run it can also be a really nice way to manage your state cleanly by separating your game out into collections for most of my projects i'll have a couple of scenes that persist from start to finish or between different states of the game so for instance i'll have a core scene usually called boot scene or application or something this then handles all of the other scenes and states and anything else that has to exist from launch i'll then make a front-end collection of scenes like a background scene and then the front-end ui and i'll also have a gameplay collection of scenes usually with a core manager scene an environment scene and a ui scene then i may hot swap different scenes in and out of the game but anything that handles the game state and game data is in this gameplay collection this way when the scene collection changes back to the front end the game stay is reset cleanly this one is pretty straightforward and should carry across your project but put the time into naming things whether it's files folders variables or methods good human readable descriptive names make everyone's life easier not to mention when you come back to that project in six months it's a lot harder to pick things up if everything is named in gobbledygook or abbreviations you no longer remember do yourself a favor and set your own conventions i don't believe in the strict by the book naming convention rules like some programmers do and frankly those are usually the worst people to work with so please don't be like that unless there's a really good reason most of the time as long as things make sense at a glance and are readable by the team you shouldn't have a problem for tutorials i'll usually be a little bit less strict about that side of things because it wastes your time but my production code is usually broken up and organized and the same should apply when it comes to file naming and asset naming some teams will have naming conventions for files and file indexing so it can be beneficial to start working that way if you're intending to work on larger productions for instance having all assets starting with a prefix based on their type and function can be extremely beneficial if you're searching an asset database from outside an engine or if there's going to be a lot of similarly named files in different formats making it fast and easy to find things at a glance is an extremely valuable trait you can provide your team and for the final organization icing on the cake take advantage of custom icons on your scripts when you're working on assets with lots of mono behaviors being able to differentiate your scripts at a glance saves you so much time and the icons show up across the editor making scriptable objects easier to identify and custom groups of code a breeze to see in the inspector most people watching this video probably already use source control in some capacity so i'm not going to lecture you on the benefits of source control however i'd wager that most of you watching this are using github or alternatives like bitbucket as your source control system personally i've always hated both of these and found that git style workflows frequently cause more headaches than they're worth unless you're a wizard with command prompts and a phd in computer science that's kind of thing with git it's good until it's not and then when it's not it's really not you see git source control isn't really designed for making video games it's essentially designed for basic easily merged text files for websites and software games encompass a much larger fraction of assets that are just awkward to handle in the way that git handles files so if you're using git right now consider dropping it for your next project and switching over to something like plastic or perforce plastic has a lot of the great features that you get with something like perforce at a fraction of the price in fact their cloud edition is free for the first three users on your team and they're now owned by unity which is promising plastic offers significant benefits over git and even unity collaborate to some degree so i've posted a link below if you want to see a full breakdown of the features but as someone who made the jump last year and hasn't looked back since some of my favorite features are how quickly it processes large files how you can check files out and lock them so other users on your team can't accidentally edit a file you're currently working on and cause a merge conflict and in the instance where something does go wrong how nice and easy it is to be able to cherry pick and revert individual files also their gui is just generally better than the nightmare of anything out there that's dealing with git i've been using plastic on a number of different projects with a couple of different teams over the past year and have absolutely fallen in love with it definitely check it out and if you don't for the love of god use something other than git it's not worth the week-long recovery time from a booked commit gone horribly wrong the final mention on this list should be pretty predictable for long-time viewers of this channel i speak from experience when i say your team and future versions of yourself will thank you i'm not exaggerating when i say that good tools and automation of repetitive tasks are the crux of a productive project so do the work early and if you spot an opportunity to automate something do it you'll often spend less time building the tool or automating the pipeline than you think and it'll save so much time for everyone involved freeing up valuable time and resources to focus on things that matter one of the greatest selling points about working in unity is how extensible a lot of the engine is so investing some of your time in learning how to extend unity and build your own tools means that you're getting the most out of the engine you don't need to reinvent the wheel every time either there's tons of custom tools on the asset store many of which have visible code bases so they can give you a great insight into some of the things you can do while also getting extended functionality with little work some of the custom tools i've built that have saved me so much time across projects are a localization tool a thumbnail icon generator for game items an npc prefab builder runtime behavior tree tools dynamic menu generation for scene collections and even a tool that automatically builds the game and uploads it to steam within the click of a button the possibilities really are endless i can't sell the benefits of custom tooling enough i am a big big fan and that brings us to the end of the list as you pick up some of these habits and improve on them you should find that the process of starting a project and seeing it through becomes a lot smoother and the quality of life for you and your team becomes easier as you work faster and encounter less friction points as usual none of this stuff is ground truth and each project you work on is going to have its own set of requirements and limitations but as a general rule of thumb these tips should give you more tools in your toolbox or at least something to consider moving forward did you find any of these tips useful or do you have any of your own productivity and organizational tips to share let me know your thoughts down below if you've enjoyed the video be sure to hit that like button and if you're new to the channel please do consider subscribing as you'll be able to know when new videos go live if you're interested in more videos from me first why not check out the one on screen now as always thank you very much for watching and i'll see you again next time

Channel: Game Dev Guide

Views: 102,064

Keywords: unity, learn, games, gamedev, how to, making games in unity, tutorial, unity tutorial, learning unity, unity3d tutorial, programming, making games

Id: Jufdyjl6poo

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021