Four Techniques for Faster Unity 3D Development
Do more with less code and greater flexibility
Unity3D has been my favorite tool for game development for quite some time. I have been using it for over 8 years now, be it for professional products, personal endeavors, and as a programming and game designer teacher. Moreover, I have been using Unity for almost all Game Jams I have been to, and it has helped me quickly build up the cornerstones of my jam-games in just a few hours.
As you might know, a Game Jam is a game development contest in which participants try to make a game from scratch over a short period of time. Game Jams usually range from 24 to 72 hours, but others spam over a more extended period, such as the GitHub Game Off that spans over the entire month of November.
After various Game Jams experiences, which even included one with my group's self-made engine in C++(only available in Brazilian Portuguese, unfortunately), I have developed a shortlist of fast prototyping rules that quickly turned into my tenant for software development: build more with less code.
The main idea of using less code (or to put it another way: to keep a smaller code base) is twofold:
- The smaller the code, the fewer the opportunities for bugs to sneak in;
