How to Create Game Systems for Your Designer in Unity

Introduction

As a gameplay and AI programmer I don't write my code for myself, it is my goal to create game systems that allow the game designer to realize their vision. Therefore it is not enough for everything to just work, if i’m the only one who understands what the scripts do and they break down when someone handles them wrong that slows down the whole creation process. I seek to write code that once written is flexible enough to do what the designer wanted it to do and maybe even some things they did not yet know they wanted. This way you can move on to implementing new systems resulting in you being able to implement more unique features instead of being stuck troubleshooting your own systems. Of course there is a balance to be struck between a flexible and specialized system and I will show examples of me making these decisions and why I choose to account for some things and not for others.

What will you learn?

• You will learn the core principles I adhere to when creating game systems which will serve as our magnetic north for the rest of the tutorial.

• You will learn how to structure an inspector using headers, tooltips and a readonly attribute which we will create yourself.

• You will learn how to think ahead and keep in mind not just what a system has to do now but what it might have to do later.

• You will learn to use scriptable objects to store data as well as how they can replace enums.

• You will learn new ways to serialize and display settings in the inspector.

• You will learn how to use dependency injection to prevent null reference exceptions.

Required knowledge

• You are familiar with the unity engine and C#.

• You know the basics of game architecture.

• A basic knowledge of scriptable objects and how they can be used to improve game architecture, I recommend watching this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raQ3iHhE_Kk

Now you may already recognize or know some of the things mentioned above but it is not just the methods that matter, I hope to share my process and practices with you. I think that as developers we can all benefit from sharing more of our thought process and tricks with each other so I hope that you will find these tips and best practices helpful.

Part 1: https://cosmicsentinelstud.wixsite.com/website/post/part-1-core-principles