I’ve only been working with Unity and programming in general for a pretty short time now, but I just hit my first rework.
I’ve been working on a game to get my feet wet with unity etc, figuring stuff out on my own as I go…
For the past week I’ve been mainly working on the GUI, various menus, and behind the scenes stuff etc. Well, as I said, I’ve been trying to do as much as possible on my own so I just went with the first thing that worked. It did the job, and I was pretty proud of my work, but then today I went to change the game resolution, and duh, all my work was mangled.
I had been stupidly using separate GUI Textures and GUI Texts for everything, all with their own scripts… a fairly convoluted tangle of objects all communicating with each other and other aspects of the game etc. Even the buttons were of course moved when I changed the resolution.
I did the further research that I should have done to start with and found I should have used DrawTextures, Labels, and Gui.matrix for repositioning, rescaling etc.
I’m now about half way through reworking everything, it hasn’t been too horrible as I’ve been able to consolidate and recycle most of my code and the Find/Replace in monodevelop has been getting a lot of use.
On the bright side my project is feeling a lot more streamlined ( at least for my newb efforts ), and I guess I learned my lesson on thinking things through before hand.
So what was your biggest rework or redesign? Has one ever killed a project? Give me some horror stories haha…
Tons over the years. The worst recent one was last year. We had been planning on eventually making the game retina, but had been putting it off because it would require reworking most the the art, the source wasn’t big enough to support retina. But because we ran a few months behind, our launch was pushed past the mandatory Apple retina required date. We basically had to repaint multiple thousands of assets in a very short period of time. Which we could have avoided by either starting with retina or launching on time. Basically we gambled and lost. Silly optimism bit us in the ass.
A terminal backtrack on an old project/prototype named Onslaught of the Laser Cat - I figured out I had designed the scoring system completely wrong.
The project never ‘got better’, even though I had multiplayer in and working, as well as swappable guns and armor.
Most of my backtracks have pertained to there being not enough performance on the device to do what I wanted to do. I’m having to learn the hard way to scale back on the ambitiousness of projects to the point where performance doesn’t even become a question, otherwise it ends up being a problem.
A big recent backtrack though (in a long long line of them) was finding out that modern LCD screens really suck for fast scrolling images and produce a terrible degree of motion blur, due to how slow the pixels are to respond to changes… which has caused me to scrap several projects that I would’ve liked to have continued with. Moral of the story, know your hardware! Or maybe the bigger lesson is, this isn’t 1990 anymore.
GUI. 32 re-writes. If you talk about GUI, Unity’s GUI just suxx.