The Importance of Working Without Assets and When to Add Them

We’ve got a working game, but we’re getting tired of watching cubes shoot other cubes with cold medicine. It’s time to swap out these placeholders with real assets.

But, even though our flying cubes and capsules are pretty drab, compared to our aspirations, they are a much easier thing to work with when first putting a game together. These basic shapes allow us to focus on the scripting and the overall function of the game without getting bogged down in the chasing down of fine details and tweaks, which your eyes would undoubtedly be distracted by. ‘Assets-first’ is a rabbit hole that easts up time as the constant tweaks to the look repeatedly effect the function. This causes a loop that can greatly lengthen the lifespan of your project. It is always much easier and far less time-consuming to adjust the assets to fit the function of the game rather than the other way around.

Well, we’re there now. Major functionality is nailed down and we can now look at linking in these better looking assets.

Start by opening up your Unity editor. We’ll assume that you have some assets that you want to use, space ships, laser effects, audio, etc. You will drag those into the Project panel into the Project panel. You want at least some Sprites and Audio to follow along. In this case we have these assets and an Audio folder in the Assets folder of the Project panel.

This will automatically import everything in to your project. We now need to convert our 3D settings on our GameObjects to 2D to make use of these new assets. Before that I want to let you know that you can preview these assets in the Unity editor.

Audio files can be single-clicked and then previewed in the small windows that opens up in the bottom of the inspector. The sprites can be view in the same manner.

One of the things we will need to make sure of is that our sprites are set for 2D. They should be already, but to check, just select one and then look at the Texture Type in the Inspector panel. It should say ‘Sprite (2D and UI)

First, lets get a better looking background in the game. And, this is simply done by dragging your intended image right to the Hierarchy panel and renaming it Background

Then you stretch your background out to fit the view in the Game panel. Select the ‘Rect’ tool or press T to do this.

Lets start by switching our view in the Scene to 2D instead of 3D. Just click on the little button labeled ‘2D.’

Just this background really changes the feel and mood of the game. It definitely makes the game feel more like it is taking place in space instead of a lab. In the next installment we will replace the remaining prototype objects with real assets.