Thread by @delaneykingrox

#Gamedev quicktip. Scene organisation plug ins are worth the money for most editors.
Being able to color code game objects in the browsers, organise them into folders (that remove their transforms on load to save overhead), group and tag assets and make collections is gold.

Sometimes scenes can include a huge number of assets to scroll through. Organising these as children of game objects seems like a great idea, but it means each object has to be transformed by its parents. This slows things down considerably.

A simple solve is to create a script that sits on a parent and dumps the children to the scene root when you start the game, before batching of static objects occurs.

Plug ins exist that do this. So have a look around.

Parenting objects is a very important technique for level building. Making all the objects on a table follow the table when it moves makes sense. As does parenting modular parts of a level, such as a shop fronts (windows doorframes, items in window).

If it takes you a while to select little parts, it discourages you from moving things around. Parenting or grouping helps.

But yes, remember the cost of extra transforms.

On that note, organising your gameplay objects, levels and units into seperate folders makes finding them easy.

Be kind to everyone when you name and spawn things. Call player 1, "player1" not something like unit_actor_04.

Games are complex, requiring a lot of cognitive load. Anything you can do to make navigating your scenes effortless is worth the time and money.

Adding scripted schortcuts to your editor like "player on selected" that either finds the player character and moves it to the point you select, or adds one to the scene if it is missing, save grind. Trawl for as little as possible.

As a noob, you may think time spent on such things is wasted on your little project. It isn't. Seconds shaved off a minute add up.