Oliver Booth

A sincere response to Unity.

Taking a stab at redesigning something that is long overdue.

Quite often, I come across people who are under the impression that a class which inherits MonoBehaviour cannot or should not define a constructor. If you are one of those people then buckle up. I'm going to dispel this myth once and for all.

Every now and then - okay… pretty much every day - I encounter someone who has decided to publicly expose state with fields, and it hurts my core.

Let's talk about that.

What is the difference between component == null, component is null, and !component?

Early last year, I wrote a blog post which explained how Unity's coroutines work. In my conclusion, I expressed that I underestimated the level of wizardry they involved, so much so that it went far beyond the scope of the article. I figured it was time to perhaps elaborate on that, and show you a glimpse of Unity's game loop and how the coroutine system works in the engine (at least, my interpretation of it.)

I recently wrote a post which explained how Brackeys' Save & Load system could be fixed so that it isn't victim to a major security flaw regarding BinaryFormatter, by instead using BinaryWriter and BinaryReader. This guide will explain how to write a better, portable, more scalable save & load system from the ground up.

Buckle your seatbelts, we have a lot to cover.

Coroutines in Unity are a way to run expensive loops, or delays in execution, without having to involve multithreading. That's right – although it's commonly believed that coroutines are multithreaded operations, they in fact run on the main thread. But have you ever asked yourself why coroutines return IEnumerator? What does that even mean? We'll take a look at how they work, and I hope to explain just how genius they are.

Recent news has hit that BinaryFormatter has a major security flaw, and should be removed from production use as soon as possible. This guide will cover an alternative approach to creating a save & load system for your Unity game.

When it comes to game dev, random number generation is a subject that comes up a lot. With the advent of Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and other games with procedurally-generated environments, unique variation in your game is an attractive feature which increases replayability and enhances player experiences.