17 Essential Tips for Unity Beginners

Learn some quick essential Unity tips to speed up your workflow and keep everything well organized throughout your Game Dev journey.

Starting to make a game is super exciting and fun. We all start somewhere and as we grow making games, we understand various aspects of Game Development techniques. We learn various shortcut ways and tend to do a number of mistakes even today. But the good thing is as you acquire more experience in this particular field, you start to realize the mistakes you made previously and improve them ahead while making future games. With that being said, we have crafted a quick article based on our Game Development experience defining Essential Tips for Unity Beginners which would potentially help you to speed up your workflow.

Use Built-In Engine Tools

Don’t start from reinventing the wheel! Unity is a powerful game engine packed with advanced solutions which can deal with complex calculations and can solve most of your need in the editor itself. It has everything that you require while making a game, like for example, animation, pathfinding, advanced camera, Recording, Post Processing, and many other things. Instead of creating everything from scratch, use the pre-available packages and speed up your workflow.

Google and Documentation are your True Friend

Stuck at a point? Don’t know what to do? Just don’t hesitate to Google it! Search everything that creates a hurdle in your path and solve it instantly using the help of Google. Also, don’t miss out to check the official documents and forums with unlimited resources covering a vast range of topics. Solving the error and figuring out things on your own is quite a good thing but if your goal is efficient working then don’t ever hesitate to check back Google and Documentations.

Participate in Game Jams

Do participate in Gams Jams often, as this helps you in sharpening your skills and socialize with the Game Dev audience. Further, it also helps you in developing leadership skills, responsiveness, and improving your quick decision capability. The idea curated during the Game Jam could be also used while making some big titles during the production.

Stay Organized

Staying Organized in a particular field is very much essential as this ensures smooth workflow and efficient work culture. And, when you are working in a big team, being organized is a must factor for you. The folder structure, the naming convention, the syntax, and many such things come under when we think of staying organized. It helps us in the long run by creating a smooth path of progression and boosting up the workflow while reducing the time factor in the development.

Integrate Version Control

Using the Version Control from Day 1 should be the first step towards setting up the project. This allows you to keep your project alive in the cloud and keep it safe throughout the development without having any fear of losing it. In fact, if you are working in a big team then you must be familiar with the Cloud sync which helps you to merge code and changes made in Unity. This helps you to keep your data and project secured while giving you the power to revert back to any point in history when your project was in a good state.

Plugins & Asset Store

Being a Unity Developer, you must be very familiar with the Unity Asset Store having thousands of Unity Assets for your rescue. These Assets are double-checked by the Unity Official Team and could potentially help you to boost up your workflow. There are many life-saving Assets that would help you to pick up quickly with the prototype and production, like for example, Lean Tween, Lean Touch, Joystick, Post Processing Stack, ODIN, Rewired, Photon, etc. No need to write everything from scratch, instead grab the Right Asset for your game and cut off your development time.

Test and Iterate more often

Play Testing your game is one of the most crucial phases in Game Development. Testing your Game makes you aware of real-world user experience and detect game-breaking bugs. It’s often suggested to test your game parallelly as you go through your Game Dev Journey as this reduces the possibility of any major bug and reverting back is comparably possible. Also, testing often also ensures a quality build and lays off a platform to improve more.

Know your audience and Platform

Unity supports more than 25 Platforms to deploy your game, but before making games for every platform out there, understand your audience first. It’s vital to know the audience you are making gaming for, whether your game is going to target the Mobile Audience, Consoles, PC, or VR? Each set of Platforms has its own advantages and set of restrictions, for example, if you are making a Game for Mobile Devices, you need to keep Performance Optimisation in mind but the same game would work flawlessly in the PC version due to higher specs.

Consistency is the Key

Being Consistent throughout your journey is a crucial thing to take care of. It’s natural to have a bad day or a fluctuating mind but each baby steps you take forward matters! To stick to a plan and working for it on a regular basis would lead you towards the perfect result, but if you tend to fluctuate testing out different game ideas simultaneously without sticking to one would ultimately make you stand nowhere. Therefore, focusing on a single motive and working for it on a regular basis is the key to a successful game.

Understand the Scope: Start Simple and keep it fun

Although, you have hundreds of ideas and you want to make the next GTA 5 but understanding the scope and keeping realistic goals should be the prime goal of all Game Developers. With time, you would realize that finishing a game is much more important than daydreaming a lot of ideas or complexing game even more with hundreds of mechanics. Always, start simple and set a goal to finish up your game with the best-polished things possible without adding up too many unnecessary points which would make the project a never-ending process.

Understanding basic Unity Errors

Understanding the Basic Unity errors would help you to quickly adopt the Unity Environment and would further help you to solve the problem instantly when it arises. It’s never a difficult task to understand these basic errors you might find while coding for the first time, however, the Unity Console box is informative enough to help you detect the cause of the error. The most common error you would find while coding is –

- Unassigned Variable Reference

- Argument

- Get component error

Know the Profiler

If you make a game that runs at low FPS on all the devices or has any serious performance issue, then the first solution you get from the Internet is to PROFILE your Game First! And yes, this is one of the handiest and crucial tools to detect all the bottlenecks of your game which further helps you in optimizing your game to run smoothly on all devices. Profiler gives you in-depth detail of what’s happening behind the scene and lets you fix all the potential issues causing performance problems. Understanding the use of Profiler would help you in optimizing your game to the best level possible.

Don’t miss out on Market

Made a game with a lot of effort? Don’t hesitate to share your work with the awesome Unity Community and take valuable feedback from the users to improve your game further. Marketing starts from Day 1 of production, so let people know what are you making, involve them in your progress, share devlogs, ask for feedback and keep the community updated with your game as it goes through the development process, and when the right time comes, just bang in wth the official production release.

Learn Unity Shortcuts

Learning Unity Shortcuts should be a Must ToDo step for all Unity Developers. This allows you to quickly finish up jobs while boosting up the workflow and the efficiency of doing things. Also, these handy shortcuts are highly tweakable and could gradually become a daily routine in a very short period of time.

Use Unity Services

Unity has some of the Powerful Services for making a successful game which is available for all to use in the Services Panel in the Editor. It has Ads for Monetisation, Game Simulation, Cloud Service, Multiplayer Features, and a lot more. So, you don’t need to leave the editor anytime, instead, everything is under your fingertips waiting to get integrated instantly into your project. This will level up your game to a different level with industry-standard services backed up by the official team itself. Don’t miss out to use the full opportunity f using these official services to make your game more stable and highly performant.

Use Vertex Snapping

Frustrated trying to place an object exactly side by side? Try Vertex Snapping and place your object perfectly aligned. Just press V and hover the mouse to select a vertex, then hold the vertex and move around the other object to snap to the desired vertex.

Use Right Project Settings

If you are intended to make a 2D game then it’s always advisable to use 2D Project instead of 3D as you are not going to use most of the features from 3D Project but Unity will be sill using those which could be resource-heavy. Also, choosing the right Render Pipeline for your game is of utmost required. If you are making a mobile game, the Universal Render Pipeline could be a Great Addition to your game taking it to the next level, but if you are making a game for PC and consoles, then you can use the true power of Unity by using the High Definition Render Pipeline in your development workflow.

So, here was 17 essential tips for Unity Beginners to boost up your game development workflow and adopt an efficient work culture while making a game.

With Love From VOiD1 Gaming