Unity Tips #1

Hey there, Gamers and Game Makers!

In this week's blog, I'm going to be talking you through some tips for Unity that you may find helpful in your projects.

1. Work To Scale:
Designing a scene and working with your various art assets can become very tedious if the scale various between each object. So, decide on your unit for scaling and make all your objects follow that scale. For example, Unity's physics system expects 1 meter in the game world to be 1 unit in the imported file. Keep your Scale Factor consistent.

2. Keep Prototype and Project Separate:
When first building your prototype version of a game, the prototype project can become quite messy with all the various aspects you've been testing. Some of which can cause game breaking bugs because they simply didn't work or there's bad code in there. As a result, once you've achieved what you wanted with the prototype and are ready to move on to full development. Document the code that you know you'll need and start the full development in a clean project, taking in only what you need. This will reduce bugs right from the start and make life a lot easier.

3. Reduce Amount Of Updates:
Sometimes as you're working on a project, a new version of Unity or an update for a plugin you are currently using might be released. While updating to the shiny new stuff is always tempting, try to avoid doing so in the middle of a project unless the update is to fix a bug in your project. Updating mid project can cause more problems than it fixes sometimes.

4. Understand What You're Using:
Unity is a powerful tool and yet a lot of us jump into using it without knowing fully what we can do with it. Take the time to read over some of the Unity documentation as I'm sure you'll find plenty of stuff you didn't know about and it'll improve your workflow.

5.Know Your Lighting:
Unity has a pretty powerfully lighting system when used correctly. Sadly, a lot of people jump into designing a scene and throw in a bunch of real time lights and suddenly notice the performance drop. Using too many real time lights will put performance of the best GPU under pressure. When designing your scene, decide what lights need to be real time and what lighting you can simply bake. The better you become at balancing real time and baked lighting, the better the performance of your scene.

Until next time!