Designing and Preparing - Pro Unity Game Development with C# - page 12

Game Development Workflows
Before jumping in and getting started with CMOD (reserved for the next chapter), I want to spend the rest
of this chapter sharing with you some Unity tips, tricks, and techniques that I frequently find helpful when
developing my own games. Making a game can be an intensive and heavy process, so it's important
to develop a general workflow that you feel comfortable following. The advice presented here is not
essential in the sense that you need to follow it to work along with this topic. But rather, it's presented
as a set of recommendations and suggestions that you may like to integrate into your own workflow,
wherever you think it can be improved. Feel free to use it or ignore it until you find a workflow you like.
Tip #1: Interface Layout
The layout and arrangement of the Unity interface is critically important to the smoothness and speed
of your working. So much so that even the slightest interface change, perhaps in the alignment of a
panel or a dockable window, can have dramatic repercussions for your efficiency and speed in the long
term. Consequently, when working in Unity, it's important to find a layout that supports your workflow
and needs from the very beginning to avoid unnecessary setbacks and frustration. Typically, the “ideal”
interface layout for you will not be general but will vary depending on the project you're developing.
For games using little or no animation, it's likely you'll never need the animation editor or the Mecanim
tools—and so you can hide those windows. Similarly, for games that never use Pathfinding or
Navigation, you'll never need to see the NavMesh tools. For CMOD, however, we'll need all those
things and more—but not necessarily throughout the whole of development. Figure 1-13 shows the
layout I'm using for this project, which is based on the Default layout.
Figure 1-13. Unity interface layout configured for developing CMOD