3 years ago

Starting a devlog: How to keep your Unity project from crumbling upon itself (from some nerd who's been using Unity for over a decade and one really hard burnout)

#unity3d #gamedev #fangame


z1r_thing.png

I’ve been doing this small project since last weekend and I’ve been suggested to start a devlog about it, so here we go!

My name is Paulo and I’m a brazilian game dev who’s recently turned 30. I work as a dev director at VRMonkey where we do a lot of outsourcing work for both Unity and Unreal VR games and also some projects of our own.
However, it’s been a while since I’ve done something **myself**. I have an old project called I_AM.exe that threw me into such a hard burnout that I’ve been mostly unable to code for myself.

No more.

I decided to throw all I’ve learned through the years, all the techniques, all the programming and Unity know into doing something… Simple.

Unity is a great tool especially for 2D games, but it has a tendency to crumble upon itself when projects grow in scale without proper preparation. It’s also really easy to get started getting stuff moving on it, but you can do it in a way it’ll bite you in the ass later.

In the 11 years I’ve been using Unity I’ve both made these mistakes and worked on projects where they’ve been made. I’m not by any stretch of the imagination any sort of super expert on it, but I like to think my long experience with “don’ts” in the engine can be applied to avoid the mistakes of my past.

SO i’ve decided to start by using Zelda 1 as a template while starting. I’m not sure how far I’m going using these sprites. Or if I’m ever going to release anything out of this. For now I just want to code and exorcize some demons.

SO after all this preamble. What do I have after a whole weekend of code?

z1r1.gif

Yeah… not looking impressive yet. But I know the groundwork for something cool is implemented.I’m throwing caution to the wind and using all the tools I have to code this in a nice and scalable way so the project stays nice to work in even as it grows and easy to add more features.

But that’s it for now. The next time I do this I’ll write up a little about the strategies I’m following to keep this from crumbling later and how *you* can keep your Unity project from punching you in the face later.

z1r1-2.png
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