Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9. Game Settings
In this chapter, we will be going over optimizations for our game. To optimize our
game, we'll add an
Options
menu that will create, save, and load configurations for
video and sound. By default, there are some settings given to us by Unity to allow the
player to choose what settings they want, but we will allow them to customize their
experience.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
• Creating video configurations
• Creating audio configurations
• Saving and loading custom settings
• Modifying Unity's native settings
• Creating an Options GUI
• Using PlayerPrefs to save settings
Figuring out what to optimize
In almost every video game, there is an
Options
menu with various aspects of the
game that you can modify. PC games tend to have the most customizations, but con-
sole and handheld games can have many customizations as well. These customiz-
ations are made possible by the developer to allow the player to edit how the game
outputs to their device and to improve the performance. The most common practice is
to make a few preset options available to the player to choose from with varying qual-
ity of output. If a player doesn't have a high performance computer, they may need to
play the game on low settings, while a player with a great computer can play on the
highest settings. Another option is to allow the player to modify different parts of the
game output such as shadows or anti-aliasing.
Unity has its own quality settings with various effects on the game. We will be using
and editing these settings as well as allowing custom configuration.
