NZGDC 2023 Talk
date
Aug 21, 2023
type
Post
year
slug
nzgdc-2023
status
Published
tags
Unity
Talk
summary
I’m giving a talk at NZGDC this year: Automate the boring parts - a practical guide to building your own helpful tools in Unity
I’m giving a talk at NZGDC this year! Friday 1 Sep at 2.55pm - hope to see you there!
Automate the boring parts - a practical guide to building your own helpful tools in Unity
Every project inevitably contains repetitive and trivial tasks. Building little tools to automate the boring parts allows you to free up your mental focus for the more interesting and more important parts of game development. Don’t wear yourself out, build reusable little tools that will do the work for you. In this session I’ll show you how to build custom menu items, attributes, property drawers, inspectors, asset importers, windows and ultimately combine all of those things to build entire little tools.
I’ll do a proper write-up later (🆕 up now! read it here), but here’s some food for thought: How much time can you spend on a tool before you’re spending more time than you save?
There’s ~248 working days per year in New Zealand. If your tool saves you 2 mins every day, that’s 8.3 hours over the entire working year. So as long as you spend less than 8.3 hours building your tool, you’ve saved time! If it saves you 5 mins every week, that’s 4.1 hours over the course of a year.
But it’s not always just about time, it’s also about mental focus. Let’s not waste our brain power on tasks that could just as well be done by a monkey, let’s spend it where it makes the biggest impact and where it’s needed the most! I mean, wouldn’t you rather focus on the interesting bits than the dull parts? So let’s get rid of all the dull parts, shall we?