We already discussed Game Objects and Components as two of the fundamental building blocks of the Unity Engine. Today, we’ll discuss their programmatic representation. This is Unity for Software Engineers, a series for folks familiar with software development best practices seeking an accelerated introduction to Unity as an engine and…

Last year, I wrote about migrating this blog to Next.js. It ended up being a huge post, so I wrote a<TOC> React component to make it more navigable. The bulk of the logic for this component is based on Emma Goto’s great examples in her “ How to build a…

There’s a little-known pattern in software architecture that deserves more attention. Data-Oriented Architecture was first described by Rajive Joshi in a 2007 whitepaper at RTI, and again in 2017 by Christian Vorhemus and Erich Schikuta at the University of Vienna in this iiWAS paper. DOA is an inversion of the…

Those picking up Unity will likely have a lot of questions about the Unity Editor. How do I navigate it? What is a good development workflow using the Editor as my IDE? Can I circumvent the editor and just do things programmatically? This article will give you a brief tour…

Reflections on the long, windy road to progress. — To this date, schema-dts is the only side-project I have that achieved better-than-moderate success. It took several hours between the time I had the idea for schema-dts and when I had a reasonably working v0.1. …

In the third installment of the Unity for Software Engineers series, we cover Unity’s Input System from basic principles. Handling player input will likely be among the first game systems you implement. Unity Technologies unveiled a new Input System in 2019 intended to replace their previous system. While the new…

One of the most transformative pieces of wisdom I’ve gotten in my career is Titus Winters’s ToTW #122 on test dataflow clarity. The Tip of the Week (ToTW) series offers advice focused on C++. …

Software Engineers starting with game development are often looking for best practices and idiomatic techniques. You’ll find some authoritative sources of idiomatic development from talks in Unity’s Unite conference, posts on the Unity blog, and members of the community like Jason Weimann. But game development isn’t just engineering; it’s also…

If you’re trying to get into game development as a Software Engineer, finding learning materials with the right level of context can be challenging. …