RustedGames

Hello folks, I would like to start this thread in order to grab tips and shared opinions related to best practices when it comes to structure and manage your project as a single indie developer.

Forgive me if my written English is not clear enough, the spoken one is worst and also the not well structured diarrhea of ideas I´m posting here.

My project is on its earlier stages and already became a 10 GB size file, I have two development environment (PC and Mac) both with 6 year old hardware and a Dropbox account to share the project between them. Making a backup when a new Unity Version or ORK Framework is released takes hours.

Normally the steps I do when I want to test a new asset from the assets store is to create a brand new dedicated project for the asset so I can have a clear idea of the files it will be replacing, to know if it uses the unity standard assets folder path (which most of the time causes issues with older assets) and to not pollute the development project.

I am forced to do this steps because of the hardware limitations I have. For example, importing one of the BIG Environment packs or the Unity´s Viking Village takes around 2-3 hours to import, then I need to close the Editor and open it again. When I see I can use the package in the development project then I now which files to exclude, but still takes forever to import it.

I started to take more seriously the system backup tasks (because of the same hardware limitations I know I am in a countdown to have it fail at some point and lose everything), so I bought an external 2 TB drive to handle the backup process.

The more assets I import the more the folder structure becomes a mess, I started to move this third party assets to a common folder to clean up a bit but then I need to revert every time a new version of the asset is available (if it worth to update it) to not break the update process.

So the purpose of this thread is to capture your thoughts, tips and suggestions on how to manage the projects with lots of assets.

Kind regards

Gregorik

I think there's only one way to do this right, and you're already doing it. I manage my project the same way. Folder structure will always be a mess with Unity and 3rd party assets, and importing all stuff will always take hours.

Catacomber

I do pretty much the same. Before I use a new asset, I try it out in a test file.

Then I strip out anything I'm not going to use, export that as an asset and reimport it into my good project.

I try to structure the folders in my project so I know where things are. I have one folder called Scene Assets where I store anything I'm going to use a lot like teleporters and traps.

My goal is generally to keep the project file under 4 Gb and still have everything I need by constantly pruning things I'll never use in the project.

Firrerreo

It's a paid for 3rd party tool, but Asset Hunter (available on the Asset Store) has been pretty helpful for me in getting rid of old stuff I'm no longer using, or for removing duplicates of junk that other packages have brought in under new folder structures. I'll often go through waves of junky assets just to get something up and running, and then replace them with nice stuff later, only to have ginormous project bloat down the road. AH has been pretty nice to have 'cause of that.

As far as a backup goes since it's taking so long for you, maybe look into a dedicated source control package (like Perforce or Git) rather than something like Dropbox? Then you can update/backup/check-in *only* the parts of the project that have changed, which can really reduce the time you're spending. Also, revision histories are a happy thing.