Imirt Workshop: Coding Smarter Not Harder with Treasa McCabe

Tickets are €5, but free for Imirt members. Login to your account at Imirt.ie and check the Membership Content section for info on your discount code.

Coding Smarter not Harder

This workshop aims to provide a hands-on introduction to implementing reusable cross-platform code in unity, and covers the following topics:

Interfaces, when to use them, when not to and how to get the concrete implementation you want at run time.

• Theory : A discussion of the cross platform code for The Darkside Detective series and how it is reused in Eldritch House
• Practice : We will build out a simple save system implementation for a unity example project using interfaces that can be extended for multiple platforms.

Git submodules

• Theory : What are they and are they worth the hassle?
• Practice : We will organise the code we wrote into a submodule and share it with a second unity example project.

Unity Packages

• Theory : Submodules are useful but can be fiddly, a bit intimidating and can lead to accidental code coupling (the opposite of what we're trying to achieve!). Unity packages are be an alternative way to distribute and maintain your system.
• Practice : We will convert our submodule from part two into a unity package that can be imported to different projects, versioned and shared.

On the day, if you want to code along:

Please have git installed and have an account with github/gitlab/bitbucket or some other repo as we will be building repos and pushing to it.

Have unity 3d installed and whatever IDE you are comfortable with. We won't be helping people with installs on the day.

The specifics of which sample projects we will be using will be sent to attendees before the day (when I decide which ones I like). The unity version will be dependent on which projects we use and will also be circulated closer to the day.

This workshop does not require any particular prior knowledge but you will get most out of it if you are familiar with some programming and unity 3d basics, I won't be spending time going over really basic coding syntax and principles. This is more about how to organise your project to be a bit more future proof, or at least how I have done it, for better or worse!

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Treasa is tech lead and game designer at Spooky Doorway, the Irish studio behind the award-winning series of games, The Darkside Detective and other up-coming projects. Before this Treasa worked in both indie and AAA studios and, before that, financial programming and other evil doings. Treasa is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, has many hobbies and other personality facets, but none of those are relevant; just know they exist.