Fortunately I am not alone in this journey. Muscat88, an incredibly talented 3d modeler will be my partner for this Week of Awesome. He will be in charge of everything 3D using 3DS Max. I will be taking care of the technical stuff, like the coding and stuff. We will be using Unity because of popular demand and because we both have a fair amount of experience using the engine. For now we are finishing the brain storming phase of the game and soon we will start with asset creation and coding.
For now we are setting up the unity project in a way that has proven to be useful to us. Trying to keep everything as organized as possible from the very beginning saves us time and effort in the long run (even for smaller projects). We follow a simple, but efficient convention... At least it works for us.
Folders: When it comes to folders, we like to name them with capital letters as to not confuse them with any other kind of file. Every time we see something named with capitals, we know it is a folder, even though the icon doesn't show up. For file names we like to name them all in small letters and with no spaces, but keeping it so that if the name is 2 or more words long, then we capitalize the first letter of the second word onwards, also depending on the purpose of the file, we would name it accordingly as to make it easy to find and to arrange alphabetically.
For instance: If we had a texture file called Sprite textures, we would rename it texturesSprite. This way it can go in a folder called TEXTURES, if such a folder contains different kinds of textures for different kinds of purposes, then it will make it easier for us to find what we are looking for since Unity will try to organize everything alphabetically.
Example
TEXTURES
texturesRegular.png
texturesSprites.png
When it comes to models. We keep two separate main folders. PROTOTYPING and FINAL which I think are self descriptive names. Each separate model will be stored in a different folder as to avoid conflict with different materials that could potentially have the same name and therefore confuse us. If a number of models share the same material, we still keep the models in their own folder, but we create a folder where all the shared materials are stored. That way, we can import the models and select them all and apply the same material to them just once.
Audio works in a similar manner, where we store MUSIC in a folder and SOUNDS in another folder, we also try to organize music and sounds in different subcategories as to avoid going through the whole project listening to each song, looking for the one we wanted to use, but forgot where it was.
Scenes are divided in TEST and FINAL as to not screw up the final project as much as we can, SCRIPTS are also divided into some categories aswell depending on the purposes of each script.
And that's it for now. With the project set up, we will now proceed to finishing up the planning and start with the actual game project.
I hope that you guys can find this useful and if you have anything to add or any advice, you are more than welcome to provide it to us in the comments. We are still beginners, we want to learn as much as we can.
