Prototyping without Assets in Unity

Creating a game is hard.

Keeping your focus can be difficult at any stage in development can be hard. As a developer who loves art but can’t create an asset to save his life, it is particularly easy to stop and digress whilst looking at pretty pictures.

For me, it is down right distracting the first moment a cube transitions from a placeholder to a beautiful sprite or object.

So for as long as is necessary, let’s keep our basic shapes as long as we can. There are a number of reasons why:

Reset will change more things than you may be prepared for,

1. Art is a thing that go wrong when you don’t even plan on tinkering with it.
   We often serialize fields so that we can adjust value while the program is running. But we often reset those values in Unity. That reset button can release any prefabs or other art that may be needed to run the program. So just don’t do it until you’ve reached a nice milestone.
2. Testing may turn into something other than testing. I am guilty of this from time to time. I play my prototype and instead of testing I get caught imagining what the rest of a completed game will look like. It is important to stay on track with regards to the overall goal of the game, but art is presentation, not function, at least in the prototyping phase.
3. You can lose focus on your task when art suddenly falls on your desk. This may be a problem more for smaller studios where you don’t have as narrow a focus. But if you are part way through a method, and then some assets hit you, you may be tempted or even instructed to put the art in. Try your best to keep your focus on your programming task so you don’t lose track of the goal.
4. Programming is iterative, so is art. So why should you worry too much about how it looks when there are going to be art test branches to test how the game looks to the art team. Prototyping shouldn’t include the final art at any point, so don’t weigh how it looks in this state too much at all.

The overarching notion is to maintain focus on your tasks at hand. You’re creating concepts and features for a game. Everyone in this industry has an imagination, so create the most badass cube you can and the art will look all the better for it once it comes in.