📄️ Composition Over Inheritance
At Gnarly Game Studio, we strongly favor the composition pattern over traditional object-oriented inheritance when building our game systems. This decision stems from the need for flexibility, scalability, and maintainability—all critical elements of game development. While object-oriented programming (OOP) has its place, its limitations can be a significant hindrance in a dynamic environment like game development, where systems need to evolve quickly and remain decoupled.
📄️ Async Programming
Async programming allows code to be executed concurrently or in parallel, improving performance and responsiveness by running tasks in the background without blocking the main thread. In game development, this is crucial for maintaining a smooth user experience, as it ensures that expensive tasks like loading assets or controlling complex game logic don't freeze or slow down the game.
📄️ Unity Atoms Framework
Unity Atoms is a core tool within our development pipeline at Gnarly Game Studio, significantly streamlining various aspects of game development. Unity Atoms is a modular, event-driven framework built on top of Unity's ScriptableObject architecture. Its primary goal is to promote data separation and reduce direct dependencies between objects, which is crucial for creating flexible, scalable, and maintainable systems. By leveraging this framework, we ensure that our games are more modular, easier to debug, and responsive to state changes, all while maintaining clean and efficient code.
📄️ Data-Oriented Development
In modern game development, the data-oriented mindset focuses on treating nearly everything in the game as data. This paradigm shift helps optimize performance, scalability, and flexibility, making it easier to manage complex systems, especially in large-scale games. Instead of thinking in terms of objects or classes, the focus is on how data is organized, processed, and accessed.
📄️ Event-Driven Development
Event-driven development is a programming paradigm in which the flow of the program is determined by events—user inputs, messages from other parts of the system, or triggered actions in response to gameplay mechanics. In Unity, this paradigm helps decouple different components of a game, enabling more flexible, scalable, and maintainable code.
📄️ Reactive Programming
Reactive programming is a programming paradigm focused on responding to changes in data or events. Instead of continuously polling for changes, systems react automatically when relevant data updates or specific events occur. This approach is especially powerful in game development, where gameplay mechanics often depend on real-time updates in game state, UI elements, or player inputs.