Improving my workflow

When I first started programming, I never knew how important the structure of your code is. Through my years of programming, I quickly learned just how important it was to improve your workflow.

While designing my new RPG, I had to create tools to improve the workflow because the game was starting to get large. The larger your game is, the harder it is to manage its data of it. When you have hundreds of items, quests, shops, and other things that carry data, it gets rather difficult to manage it all. The way I decided to manage my data was to create a custom editor to be able to see all the data of the game and quickly edit the values. Once these values were updated, I just had to reload the game and it was changed throughout the entire game.

Custom tools I created to improve my workflow.

Creating the tools was made simple by using Odin Inspector from the Unity Asset Store. Getting the data structure right wasn't easy, however. From the beginning of the development of this RPG, I knew it was going to have to be scalable. This meant that I had to get the data structure right early, or at least good enough to be able to change it easily. I knew about scriptable objects and how they are great for holding data, so that is what the game is mostly built upon. The items are scriptable objects and each item has its own class as well to further separate the data. Some items are abilities and some are weapons for example. Abilities don't have the same data as a weapon, yet they are still items. This structure was needed to make it easy to create more items or abilities in the future. When the game needs to be scaled up into a proper game with a bunch of content. This structuring of the data didn't stop at just the items, I made it so general game settings are done with the scriptable objects as well. The rarity colors for example are modified in one area of the editor, and then the rest of the game just accepts it and changes it everywhere, from the tooltips, down to the loot beam when the item is dropped.

Custom item editor.

These improvements to my data structure made it faster to develop more features for the game. It will also help when the game is ready to be expanded. When I need to create a new item the overall workflow for doing so is much quicker thanks to the custom editor. Improving the data structure for these tools is a good thing because it will make it easier to add content to the existing systems once they are fully developed. Being able to add new items, quests, journals, and even shops will make the development process much faster when the game is ready for expansion.

You can check the Untitled RPG page for more details about what is in the RPG.