Building a Character - Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - page 29

Getting your project started - the right
way
Before you start your project for real, you should consider how you intend to set it up and
architect your project in the long term. I've looked at or worked with far too many projects
that have created problems for themselves by just diving in rather than designing the out-
line for the project at the start.
Your game and your assets are not the only things to consider when starting a fresh pro-
ject. Sure, you can start importing assets, creating scripts, and getting things running; most
Proof of Concept ( POC ) projects start this way. Once your project is of a sufficient size
and you start expanding on your initial concept, you'll realize that you have issues with re-
gards to picking up items and putting them together. Then, you will start devising new
ways to organize your project and eventually find that it's an unmanageable mess; never-
theless, you will stride on, taking longer and longer to produce new content or add new
features.
The best advice one can give is to think about your entire project and how you organize it
as an asset in itself, and accordingly, design it correctly from the beginning. So, what fol-
lows are a few short tricks that you can learn to get started on the right foot.
Architecture is a point that is often missed out in any game development and should not
be overlooked. What follows are some of the best practices you can use from day 1 to
design your game and thereby save a lot of time to fix or change and reorder things later.
These lessons will be used throughout the course of the topic wherever applicable.
Note
As this chapter focuses on the implementation of the 2D sprite system, we will return to
these lessons later in Chapter 5 , NPCs and Interactions ; however, they are critical at this
juncture, that is, before we write the code.