The Unity Engine is essentially a 2D/3D engine and framework, which allows users to import and assemble assets, and write code to interact with the objects – all in a user friendly development environment. However, it works more like a core for the game or application as it’s highly modifiable when it comes to developer tools. Rather than just use a set of standard tools, Unity allows developers to tweak their palette of in-app gear to boost development ability while reducing the overall time it takes. One of the most powerful parts of the Unity is the Unity Asset Store – the best asset marketplace, where artwork, 3D models, animation files, but also other useful third party plugins can be found. However, very often developers themselves need to create their own tools in order to speed up or improve their work.

Here at Unity Developers we are always in the process of creating new and useful development tools. Being effective and smart whilst developing a product is the main principle of our Lead Developer – Greg Lukosek. Therefore, over the years of writing code and working with Unity, we have developed (and constantly improving!) a set of great tools, which we utilise in almost every project. Here are some of them:

UIStoryboard. This is the core of each user interface we build in Unity. A great tool, which manages the structure of what the user sees on the screen and how he interacts with your game/app. The Storyboard is essentially a block of coded and organised views that can interact with each other, can animate and display everything to the user. Having our UIStoryboard makes UI development for different platforms and resolutions a much easier task.

MVC Methodology. Standing for Model/View/Controller, this is a highly used pattern in game development and a great way to speed up development.  The basic elements of MVC are:

• Model – the classes responsible for storing and handling data.
• View – the elements responsible for handling displaying data and receiving input from the user.
• Controller – the sections responsible for the logic behind the app in general. They also handle respond to the input from views, and they pass data into them.

We use the MVC methodology for a number of reasons, because not only does it make for a faster application development process, but it makes the codebase much easier to navigate within. By dividing the thinking process into separate chunks like data, interface and controlling units developers can tackle any issues faster as aren’t overloaded with the extensively long code, but smaller bits of it. This methodology is also extremely helpful when any data or functionality needs changing, as code dependencies are separated in a better way.

As VR becomes increasingly mainstream Unity Developers are always pushing hard with VR applications, and with the Oculus Quest 2 just around the corner, we are ramping it up even more. To develop exceptional VR applications, we use some of the best developer tools available through Unity, but have also built our own tools to speed up development cycle.

Debugging Tools. Being a developer and building a game or application is very often a massive task. Thus being able to test and debug developed game/application is very important. By developing automated debugging tools the possibility of locating bugs in code is much higher, but also speeds up the process of finding them.

Investing in collecting a set of developer tools will not only increase your efficiency, but will speed up your development cycle too. Here at Unity Developers, we have engaged a set of tools that speed up our development and make the entire process highly streamlined.  Follow our lead and get the most out of the Unity engine.