I’ve started building my own Unity games recently. Things have been pretty smooth until my latest project, unity-idle-fighter.

I’ve struggled with a few different concepts and have learned quite a bit. Here are some of my takeaways:

  • Coding

    • The concept of a Scriptable Object makes a lot of sense. Being able to reuse a template for static data is perfect for this game.

  • Editor

    • Figuring out animations was time-consuming, mainly due to the lack of support for prefab animations
      • Import spritesheet as asset
      • Set to multiple images and slice up with Unity Editor
      • Create an empty GameObject and click on it
      • Open the Animation Tab
      • Click Create new animmation in that tab - this will create two prefabs (AnimationClip and AnimatorController)
      • Drag your spritesheet into the Tab
      • Open the Animator Tab
      • Drag and drop your AnimationClip into the default state

  • Building into a deliverable

    • 50% time spent building game, 50% time troubleshooting issues when creating a WebGL build
    • Avoid using any Classes that rely on the UnityEditor namespace, as these classes will only work in the editor
      • Specifically AnimatorController, use AnimatorOverrideController instead
    • How things show up on screen differ from the Unity Editor preview and the actual WebGL build, mainly due to camera and canvas settings
      • The overlay (Canvas) vs the images (in Camera view) are in completely different areas on the Editor and don’t look like they would fit together, but they do
      • I still haven’t fully understood this, and resorted to getting it working for a fixed resolution of 1280x800
    • Most of my time spent learning was how to interact with the Unity Editor and not actual coding

  • General

    • The official website has good examples
    • Brackeys does a great job at explaining how to do specific things with Unity
    • It was difficult to search for answers to specific Unity problems via Google
    • StackOverflow and Unity forums have a lot of open Unity questions without answers

In summary, when you embark on a non-beginner Unity game, prepare to run into a lot of Editor-specific obstacles that are not code-related.