Tips you wish someone told you before starting on Unity

RuanSmit

Hello!

As im learning Unity I have the strange feeling of "Hopefully im not doing something now which i'll regret later".

Things like you needed to start with this kind of project to get the best post-processing, or you should have done
this in the beginning to avoid bulky resource-hungry loading times,etc etc

Any helpful tips when starting off with Unity would be really appreciated :)

Thanking you

Elyaradine

It's better to jump right in and try things, and not be afraid to fail. You'll always be able to do something better with more experience. I'd honestly not worry too much about that, and direct most of your focus on what your player will actually experience.

It's really easy to get carried away with trying to chase more and more tech, search for more and more buzzwords, buy more and more plug-ins, optimize more and more code. Often those are distractions from the core of the experience: what is it about my game that would make anyone give a damn? How can I entertain you, and entice you into playing what I've got to offer over any other game out there (many of which are free)?

Don't think about it so much that it becomes some kind of crippling standard, but it's worth thinking about every now and then to double-check that you're working on something that a player will actually notice.

SkinnyBoy

Learn the principles. Unity is just a tool

critic

I wish someone told me to use Unity sooner instead of using lower level engines or contemplating making your own engine.

francoisvn

critic said:

I wish someone told me to use Unity sooner instead of using lower level engines or contemplating making your own engine.

I see this happen again and again. There are countless discussions on here and elsewhere, with people trying to convince beginners to not roll their own engine, and it often fails. That makes me super sad. What could someone have said to you that would (hopefully) have changed your mind?

Elyaradine

SkinnyBoy said:

Learn the principles. Unity is just a tool

@SkinnyBoy What would you consider "the principles" to be?

critic

francoisvn said:

I see this happen again and again. There are countless discussions on here and elsewhere, with people trying to convince beginners to not roll their own engine, and it often fails. That makes me super sad. What could someone have said to you that would (hopefully) have changed your mind?

It was an alien concept due to not knowing enough, think that maybe showing me how simple things were in Unity would have been a better approach than telling me how complicated game engines were.

VMASTER

@RuanSmit in terms of advice I can give with my experience, the first one would be to keep your files organised in files and subfolders. For example, keep all the Scripts in a scripts folder and all the sprites in their own folder and sub folders for the different sprite collections for characters/animations.
You mentioned Post processing, when starting a project, make sure you decide which packages you will need to make use of for your game and see which version of Unity might have all the latest versions... it is best to use very few packages that are in preview.
For example, if your game will make use of a controller and you want the transition between Keyboard and Pad controls to be seamless, consider installing and using the new input system. This also goes for stuff like the HDRP and URP, as if you implement these halfway through development, you will have to replace all your materials for example (there is a quick option that converts everything to support the specific RP, but my experience shows that it isn't the best).
One last thing I'll say for this post, consider making use of Unity collab in order to backup. save your work and make use of it on multiple machines (although since lockdown is currently happening, I'd say it is more for backing up and keeping notes on your progress)

Good luck with your project and I hope you have fun with Unity!

BlueDesertDio

A simple tip which alluded me for a while and unfortunately didn't pick up in any tutorials was making sure any 3D models you import have already optimized triangulated faces, Unity will triangulate on import (unless you select keep quads) and increase your polygon count unnecessarily.I noticed improved frames on my mobile games after triangulating, then optimizing and then importing.

konman

Hi @RuanSmit Wow, that is such a broad question. :)

The most funniest of issues I have encountered and a most useful trick I have learnt much, much later into Unity game dev is the fact that I found I often make changes in the Unity hierarchy to objects WHILE THE GAME IS PLAYING. When it stops, all changes are reverted! WTF! Then I have to redo them again losing time over and over again... Aaaaargh!!!

A handy tip to prevent this is to go to the "Edit->Preferences->Colors" menu at the top of the Unity editor and to change the "Playmode tint" property to a nice garish colour (Red or blue) when in play mode to warn me that I mustn't do changes in the hierarchy while the game is playing. This simple trick has saved me many, many hours of work lost, LOL! Simple but effective.

Edit: Finally, another tip if you are focusing on a platform like Android for example. Know that the artist sprites/textures can be as large on disk as they wish it to be and should not be interfered with (god's forbid). You as developer have the power to scale it down during the build. Click on the sprite/texture and note the "Max Size" property in the inspector. (Powers of 2) Scale it down and the resolution/size of the texture will have a huge impact on the build size at the cost of image quality (it's a compromise of course). Android deploys to the Play store have a 150 MB limit (APK) which becomes a huge problem if you have large amounts of detailed art. Play Asset Delivery (PAD) is a work-around to this, but requires more effort to implement (Assets are downloaded separately to the game install - install time or on-demand).

Cheers,
Konman