You Need To Know These Unity Tips!

[Music] I don't want to waste your time this video is all about making the most of the time that you have to make games no matter if it's full time or just a couple minutes a day this video will mostly be about all the time saves that I personally found so most of these will be in the unity game engine but some of these should apply to other game engines anyways be sure to subscribe for more Unity tips and tricks also liking and commenting helps my small Channel and the algorithm so it is really appreciated but no more wasting time let's start these first few tips are related to the most obvious and most frustrating waste of time that anybody who has used Unity has had to deal with the loading screens so if you're struggling with loading your project reloading your scripts and all that compilation then try dropping a few thousand dollars on a brand new pc with the top of the line SSD and 4 million gigabytes of ddr19 RAM but if throwing excessive amounts of money at the issue doesn't really suit you then I have a few other tips that might really help first off whenever you go to click play in unity there is always this long delay between you pressing and it going but you can actually just skip this on Modern versions of unity you can just go into the settings and under the editor tab there is a section called interplay mode settings then enable this experimental option and make sure to disable the options under it boom now whenever you click the play button it'll play this does have some drawbacks though usually during this loading time EMD is not only saving your game which you now needs to do manually before going into play mode but it is also reloading the scene and everything in it to make sure that play mode in the editor is almost exactly equal to what you will get in the actual build of the game so basically if you disable it you might have some bugs that have to do with the scene not properly resetting personally I use the faster method 99 of the time especially whenever I'm rapidly iterating or something or debugging something unrelated to the scene but when I am bug fixing I also try turning editor reloading back on occasionally to make sure this is not the source of the problem personally I think the convenience and time saving is worth a little bit of extra effort the other main loading screens that you have to deal with in unity are when you open the project and when you compile after changing some scripts whenever you're opening your project my main piece of advice is to go on a run or watch a movie or something because that takes forever and there's no real getting around it especially with 3D games Unity is a big program and there's just a lot of stuff to load but with recompiling you actually do have a few options you can use assembly definitions which I already covered slightly before my last tips and tricks video but basically they make it so that you only have to recompile parts of your code they probably aren't worth the effort in smaller projects where it only takes a few seconds to recompile but for the big ones they are very important in Saving Time and keeping your quote clean here's a link to a video on how to do this moving on from these loading screens I'm going to go over some small things that you can do to replace slow and annoying tasks with easier and faster versions of themselves or a few ways you can automate them all together first off animation controllers are slow not only are they slow to work with but they are also pretty bad performance wise so if you only have one animation for an object that it does continually then consider just using the Legacy animation component the unity engine seems to warn against doing it but it actually is better for performance second up you don't actually have to use use the steam machine GUI thing if you don't want to you can do it all manually and personally I do a manually for some of my more simple animated characters in my game the main reason that I'll do it manually is that for example with this enemy in my game it can transition from any animation that it has to any other one at any time so it doesn't really make sense to make an animation State machine because it would just be a spaghetti a boxes connected to each other instead I just throw all these boxes together in the animator and don't even bother connecting them and then I Crossfade from animations directly in code this is pretty easy to do already but I also set up a custom script to make it even easier and smoother to go through and also added things like holding the States you can just look at my code here for this stuff but also tarodev who seems to be my favorite guy to mention in these tips and tricks videos has a great video on this and you should watch it presets are pretty simple to understand there are basically some default settings you can easily apply to textures sounds and anything else that you import into your project make sure they use these but you can actually make these defaults into default defaults uh let me explain go to edit project things preset manager and here you can put in all the default resets that you want so for a pixel art game you probably want to import all your assets with a PPU of whatever your tile set grid size is so 32 in my case and then also make sure the texture is uncompressed and on point filter this is kind of a basic tip but it actually took me forever to find out that this existed so hopefully it helps somebody who also didn't notice this but in game development no matter what engine you are using the biggest possible waste of time and effort you could have is losing all of your progress so you should use a source control program to back up your game I previously suggested using GitHub but I actually moved to Classic SCM a little while ago and it's way better for me GitHub had the habit of breaking on me every few weeks and since I'm not proficient in git or the command line I just made a new repo and moves everything over and hoped that it never happened again and of course it always happened again plastic sem on the other hand is actually designed for big projects and video games specifically and transitioning to it was easy and I haven't had any issues with it so I recommend it for sure one of the biggest time scenes for game development is definitely an asset creation especially for people like me who aren't really artists by trade it can take a while to make all the art that is needed so I have a few suggestions and this first one is pretty controversial in fact I used to disagree with this practice but I have been convinced of its legitimacy recently by a fantastic example of it kid bashing is the practice of taking pre-made asset hacks and combining them with some Artistry and shaders to create assets for a game and don't get me wrong it's hard to get this to work it really is an art form in itself if you do it poorly your game will look like an asset flip and it will lack any uniqueness and style in its environments but it's proven to me by project feline which is another deadlock series which you really should watch with enough care and effort you can create an amazing looking world with kit bashing but be warned this is expensive as you have to buy tons of asset packs so this technique is probably a bit risky for most developers but I think that it has led to some of the most oppressive environments possible in an indie game another alternative to Kit bashing and stuff like that could possibly be using AI to create textures and stuff for your game now personally I don't know much about this and also there's a lot up in the air currently about the legality of AR art generators so be careful if you're making a game around it because it's possible that in a few years all of your assets will be in violation of copyright laws but I think that once properly regulated this technology will be incredible for independent developers whenever creating all their assets but moving on the only other tip I have receive eating up asset creation is simply to try and recycle assets if you can especially in animation is motion is hard to get to look right so after you get a Run Cycle done it is definitely not cheating to use it as a base for your other characters runs personally I do try to make changes to distinguished characters for instance in my game project Seaborn this character Yuri is one pixel taller than the first character and his idle pose is slightly different and also in a 3D environment you really don't need a huge amount of variation of assets as I got by with only about five different Rock models in my previous game it's simply rotating scaling and positioning the rocks in Geometry it got them to look very different from each other obviously if you can you should make as much unique art as possible if you want your game to look beautiful but if you don't have the time or team members for that then just be smart with what you spend your time doing in my opinion making a ton of average assets with one or two fantastic seeing their assets like a landmark or a nice animation will likely look better and leave a bigger impact on the player than making a ton of slightly above average asses that take significantly longer to make even if you have all the time in the world to work work on your game if you don't actually work on it you won't get anywhere so keeping yourself reductive and motivated is difficult and one of the things I have struggled with most in game development but I do have a few tips that have helped me in the past the absolute biggest thing for me has actually been this YouTube channel making videos sharing my game and getting feedback from people in the comments has been incredible for motivation I feel like I need to make progress in that interesting things to the game in order to make the videos better and at the end of the slight pressure to perform and the deadlines that come from releasing a devlog every month or so really helps me to be consistent in my work however burnout is still an issue and the amount of distractions that I have around me at all times for my computer phone or just wall if I'm that unfocused get in the way also it can be hard to have the energy to continue to work in the afternoon after a day of school athletics and homework ultimately it just comes down to having practice staying on task instead of procrastinating to just take scheduled breaks as for Bernat on large projects I've always renovated this by just having a variety of smaller projects and game jams that I work on to take breaks and explore other skills not all these are game development related a lot of these are actually video essays that I make on this channel but some of these game jams and little projects also end up as other videos for my channel so it kind of works out well for me there are so many tips and tricks for motivation that I have likely missed in this video and if you have any suggestions or tips of your own on motivation or time management or game development in general then be sure to post them in the comments but the last tip I have and the most important one is to get off YouTube and work on your game just kidding not really

Channel: ButWhyLevin

Views: 26,824

Keywords: gamedev, devlog, indie game dev, butwhylevin, but why levin, indie devlog, devlog unity, couch combat, unity devlog, indie game devlog, game development, Unity tips, beginner game dev tips, 25 game dev tips, Unity tutorial, game dev retrospective, Game dev tips, how to make games, Unity tricks, save time with unity, dont waste time in game development, I Wish I Had Known This Before I Started Unity Game Development, game dev regrets, unity 2023, unity beginner tutorial

Id: -u-dLXBZQ0M

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023