Unity Project Style Guide

I wanted to share the style guide we are currently using for general project structure and asset naming conventions. It has ideas gathered from forum discussions and things that worked for us in previous projects.

link: https://github.com/stillwwater/UnityStyleGuide

What conventions do you use to keep your assets organized and easy for programmers and artists to work with?

 

I really liked this + 1

 

I suggest putting a "_" before "_Art", "_Audio", etc... so that go on top and you do not get confused with the incoming folders from outside. For example Assetstore add-ons.

idea for frequently used assets: if you need to be on top as for example "__Scene" you can use 2 "__"

 

I love stuff like this.

Getting back into Unity after a few years away, I'm very interested how others setup their Unity projects.

 

Same here, I wish more people would share how they organize their files!

I think a lot of people overlook project organization when starting a new game, and when their project gets large the mess becomes unproductive.

 

Similar to Alan Mattano's suggestion, I prefer to put all project-specific files in a folder named "__Game" or "__Project" with two underscores, since some Asset Store products import into folders with a single underscore. This keeps your files separate from third party assets and always available at the top of the Project view.

Unity's Spotlight Team has some excellent Best Practices posts, such as William Armstrong's Project Setup. Charles Hinshaw's article has good advice, too, such as firewalling what you don't ship. But the single best article I've come across is Valentin Simonov's What NOT to do in Unity: the most common mistakes to avoid. Some great advice that jumped out at me:

• Identify your requirements (target devices, rendering/CPU budgets, etc.) before creating the project.
• Start a new project from scratch after initial prototypes.

It also includes excellent advice for asset settings; programming; and CPU, GPU, & UI performance.

My own advice is to identify the rough "shape" of your project -- Will it be heavy on art assets? Contain a lot of code? How many team members? etc.

If you expect a lot of code, use assembly definition files, or even separate projects that compile into DLLs. (Also set up tests. They'll will save you way more time than your initial investment.)

If you expect a lot of art assets, use asset bundles in separate projects, and implement them as early as possible. It's a real hassle to restructure your project after the fact to use asset bundles.

I've consulted on some 100 GB projects with many thousands of lines of code (set up that way before I got there). It's no fun when a single script change triggers a 5 minute recompile. And if Unity has to reimport the project for some reason, it's time to take the afternoon off while it cranks away.

Don't bother doing either of these for your prototype projects, but certainly consider them for your production projects.


One thing that I haven't seen consensus on is grouping related assets. Some teams like to do this:

__Game/

Models/

Dragon.fbx
Orc.fbx​

Textures/

Dragon.psd
Orc.psd​

Materials/

Dragon.mat
Orc.mat​

Prefabs/

Dragon.prefab
Orc.prefab​

And others like to do this:

__Game/

Dragon/

Dragon.fbx
Dragon.psd
Dragon.mat
Dragon.prefab​

Orc/

Orc.fbx
Orc.psd
Orc.mat
Orc.prefab​

I tend to prefer the latter. What are other people's thoughts?