sigtrap

It’s a seemingly inherent desire in most programmers to make every solution as general as it possibly can be. That is to say, to design code such that it can handle almost any input, any situation. The attraction is obvious – design one amazing bit of code, and you can use it all over your…

I’ve mentioned statics in the first post in this series, on Singletons, but there’s a bigger discussion to be had about this concept, and – more generally – the concept of “state”. Static Fields Static fields exists outside any particular instance of the object that declares them, and are thus shared between all instances of…

We’re finally back to the topic that prompted this whole thing. I didn’t want to start off by being too controversial, but I think you know what I’m about by now. So, even more than usual: OPINION WARNING! What is Factoring? First off – it’s not refactoring. That’s entirely separate[1]Refactoring, loosely, is rewriting code to…

As I noted in the first post in this series[1]or rather, in the footnotes – but if you read the footnotes you’ll already know that, and if you don’t then you’re not reading this either., Source Control, or Version Control, isn’t strictly a software design topic. But I’m going to argue – unlike specific patterns,…

Defensive coding is the practice of making your code error-resistant. The idea is to make your code handle unexpected circumstances gracefully, rather than just going wrong or crashing. It’s a pretty broad topic, but in its simplest form means checking for invalid values or references before attempting to do things. For example, consider the following….

Inheritance is a big deal in object oriented programming. The ability to extend parent classes into subclasses, and have those subclasses be recognised as the parent (via polymorphism), is extremely powerful. It’s one of those Big Ideas that, once it clicks in your head, drastically changes how you think about coding. And if you’re not…

The previous post was about a fairly specific “pattern” (Singletons). The topic this time is more of a general concept. Encapsulation, also known as Information Hiding, refers to designing code modularly, such that each part is as isolated from the others as possible. This doesn’t mean any one technique – it’s a broad engineering principle…

A recent debate on Twitter (on #UnityTips Tuesday) got me thinking. The vast majority of coding articles and tutorials for Unity (both official and third-party) are pretty specific. You get plenty of “How to Make a Space Shooter” or “How to Make Hitscan Weapons”, and almost none of “Minimising Coupling Between Classes” or “Writing Maintainable…

This is a series of posts prompted by an observation – the vast majority of Unity tutorials and articles (official and third-party) teach how to use Unity, not how to design software. It’s easy to find, for example, specific help on “how to make a hitscan weapon in Unity”. And there’s plenty of abstract software…

Given crafting and looting are a large part of the Sublevel Zero ExperienceTM, you might imagine we’ll be including quite a large variety of weapons. Turns out you’re very perceptive, because that’s absolutely correct. We’ve planned carefully for this, so a lot of care has gone into making sure it’s easy for us to prototype…