2. Agenda
• About Mii
• The red thread
• INDIE-ana Jones
• Know your enemy
• Rules of peace
• Build a pipeline
3. About Mii
I know… the picture is my Live Avatar… because he is simply
beautiful
4. About Mii
• 24 years
• technology guru at Bigpoint
• studied at Games Academy
• worked many years as freelancer
• lecturer for game development
• focused on high level architecture
for frontend and backend
• aka Ezio Auditore da Firenze
Health
Mana
3745
Strength: 56
Agility: 89
Intelligence: 423
Willpower: 345
Vitality: 212
5467
Developer Level 34
6. The red thread
• whenever you see this icon I will reference to the red thread
• for this presentation we create a small example “Game Project”
7. The red thread
Angry Students
• game like Angry Birds
• students defeat the Exam-Monsters in their fortresses
• use stones, explosive mixtures and other cool things to
destroy your enemies
• 3D graphics and animated story movies
• cross platform and DLC
9. INDIE-ana Jones
• Unity is perfect for one-man-armies and smaller teams
• all workflows and tools are optimized to achieve fast
results
• the editor is a good combination of a development and
asset management tool
• the usability and simplicity are state of the art
• many things are extensible and customizable
• one solution to create games
• in short: Unity is a good choice for your team
10. INDIE-ana Jones
• most customers are indie developers or smaller teams
• thus these people are the root of the company
• the success speaks for itself
• Unity also wants to reach major and professional
developers in the future
• for this reason they work closely together with companies
to optimize the engine and editor for bigger teams
• I am part of this board
11. INDIE-ana Jones
Angry Students
• our team is part of a big company
• we have many cooperating departments
• many of our assets come from external teams
• we are always using the newest version for our tools
and programs
• not every employee has licenses for all of them
13. Know your enemy
your team
• What is your production environment?
• Where do the assets come from?
• What are the key technology features of the project?
• cross platform, DLC, asset streaming, quality
settings
• How is the team set up and what are the strengths and
weaknesses?
• What are the needs of your team?
• development, 3D and 2D art, audio, game design,
balancing, level design, Tech art
14. Know your enemy
Unity 3D
• Do you use the “Professional” version?
• Which tools and features would you like to use?
• Which programming language do you want to use?
• Boo, JavaScript aka UnityScript, C#
• Who will use it?
• Do you develop on Mac or Windows?
• Does it support your version control system?
• What external tools do you want to use?
• What are the typical pitfalls?
16. Know your enemy
Angry Students
• the team has experience with Unity and game
development
• our artists are only working with Maya and Photoshop
• our developers prefer the use of C#
• we want to build the complete game with the Unity
tools
• only our core development team has a Unity license
18. Rules of peace
• welcome Visual Studio and .Net/Mono
• develop your code with Visual Studio
• deploy your code and components as *.dll
• use the full power of C# and the framework
• abstract as far as possible from the engine
• separate productive code from your extensions or tests
• forget public variables because there are nicer possibilities
• standardize
• naming and coding conventions
• asset handling
19. Rules of peace
• Keep your project clean!
• remove unneeded assets
• don’t use program specific file formats: PSD, MB, MAX, …
• the project is not the right place for work in progress assets
• clear directory structure
• keep the overview
• “power of two”
• Extend!
• automatize as much as possible (What must I do to re-create
the project and how long does it take?)
• write your own importer
• use the right tool for each job
20. Rules of peace
• the project as a puzzle
• “Prefabs” are your friend
• scenes should not contain persistent data
• Unity should be the container for all the parts of your project
• the right settings
• enable external version control
• use text file parsing
• insert only necessary files to your version control system
• damn meta files
• Write a tool to handle meta files and external version control!
22. Build a pipeline
• the best method is building a content and asset pipeline
• this automates many of your steps
• tools or scripts ensure the correct handling of the assets
• adaption to the different requirements of the platform
• manage our project rules and contentions
• the pipeline can also be a part of a control system
• Steve Jobs: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
23. Build a pipeline
• running CI system
• builds our hole project
• necessary for the automation
• asset importer for Unity
• global settings for our assets
• generates Prefabs, Materials and other thinks
• asset management tool
• processed our assets and adds it to our project
• build scripts and configurations
• for our assets
• for our code
What do I need for a minimal environment?
24. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
root
assets
art
audio
source
game
library
shared
library
release
“Unity”
project
Our very simple
directory structure
25. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
assets
management
tool
importer Unity
3D
This process imports all our required assets to the Unity project and
creates a “Prefab” if needed.
The “management tool” and the “importer” process the assets. To
automatize this step create naming conventions and configuration
files.
26. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
Visual Studio *.dll importer Unity
3D
The same goes for our code. All parts will be built and deployed to
Unity.
The “importer” controls the “MonoBehaviour” generation and
depends this to the “GameObjects” or “Prefabs”.
27. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
assets importer
project for
mobile
project for
console
project for
PC and Mac
The “importer” also controls the generation
of the different platforms projects.
Some assets will be different between
platforms (e.g. LOD).
28. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
assets importer resources/packages
DLC 01
DLC 02
DLC 03
We have the same situation for our DLC
content. We want to publish these as
separate packages.
A build script inside of Unity will process
and pack our content.
29. Build a pipeline
Angry Students
project build script packages release
The final steps are building and releasing our project.
In our example, we have a running CI system. All steps are
controlled and automatized by this system.
