Tooling

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Michael and I'm Hamster's Cave developer.

Today topic for my small post is tooling. Every programmer have some tool he uses every day, like text editor plugins for syntax or small applications which helps to simplify some routine tasks.

In past 10 years I've made a lot tools for testing, checking, setting application state and so on. But all that was done for web, which is way more easy than making same tools for games. However I can't work effectivly without useful tools.

For Hex Planet Puzzle we use unity scriptable objects, which let us easily store runtime data for levels and planets. And this was great way to visually represent our application data. We link next level to level pretty easy. Planet store all levels information they need and so on. The only problem was with persisting this data on user side.

Here we use unity JSON support. Several hours of playing with it and first dirty prototype was ready. The only problem we have was `scriptable objects doesn't reset their state`. It means if we have some boolean field in it and we change it in editor it would stay in this position after play mode.

So, at that point we need a tool which let us set up our application state for several needs.
After that thing done we could set up whole application due to our need in a seconds.

Conclusion here: always create tools which will simplify your work process.

That's it for today.

Thanks for reading and hope you'll find something useful in my posts.

Cheers, Michael