Level Up Your Coding: Mastering SOLID Principles for Game Developers
When you are planning and coding your projects within Unity as an Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) practitioner — programming that is based on objects containing data — patterns are a great way of making things uniform, saving time, and, hopefully, relating to other programmers who share the same patterns with you.
However, you won’t always have a design pattern for all of your projects and it may not be practical to try and force plans that simply aren’t practical. If we brush the design patterns to one side, there is an even deeper methodology to programming — the SOLID principles. These principles are guidelines that remind OOP programmers what they should be thinking about when coding projects. They outline what you should and shouldn’t be doing with your code. Yes, you could ignore the SOLID principles, and even ignore design patterns, but difficulties will occur and increase the risk of you coding yourself into a dead end and creating multiple errors when you change a single line of code. You’ll have colleagues scratching their heads not knowing what your code is doing, as well as inefficient classes and methods that potentially slow down your system — the list goes on. It’s very easy to not follow a plan and be keen to just get the job done. Eventually, this will haunt you and you will have to accept that you need a plan and you need to follow rules, especially if your project expands, even if it’s just you coding the project.
The five SOLID principles are as follows:
Single responsibility principle
Open/closed principle
Liskov substitution principle
Interface segregation principle
Dependency inversion principle
