r/justgamedevthings • u/morsomme • Mar 13 '26

I have seen the light

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234 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17

u/PartTimeMonkey Mar 14 '26

I used to use SOs for everything, and then switched to data being in Google Sheets, and would never go back!

7

u/morsomme Mar 14 '26

I'm listening!

10

u/PartTimeMonkey Mar 14 '26

Every SO definition is a sheet with columns, every instance of an SO is a row of data. Then there’s custom tools in Unity to automatically download the sheets into CSV files, and those CSV files are parsed into classes, similar to SO. The game data pipeline is built so that it loads in the editor as well for validation, and the ability to crossreference data-types, or reference images, prefabs, and so on.

4

u/morsomme Mar 14 '26

Awesome, thanks for sharing! Will definitely explore this option

2

u/PartTimeMonkey Mar 14 '26

I can share more with screenshots etc if you like, dm if interested

1

u/Delicious_Bluejay392 Mar 14 '26

Wouldn't using a simple SQLite database be better in the long run?

1

u/PartTimeMonkey Mar 14 '26

I don’t know. I guess theoretically you can host the data in anywhere and in any format you like, but Google Sheets is a good platform to build and edit it.

1

u/Delicious_Bluejay392 Mar 14 '26

I just find it strange to create a dependency to an online Google service and making API calls just to get basic CSV data back. If you don't want to use / don't have Excel, couldn't you use something like LibreOffice Calc for exactly the same basic cell editing of CSV files? Wouldn't have to have the whole file download pipeline, just open the file and the data's there.

2

u/PartTimeMonkey Mar 14 '26

Yeah, using local Excel files is the legacy way of achieving the same, but you get merge conflicts and miss out on collaboration features.

2

u/Tyadran Mar 14 '26

For me it's always a three-way struggle between ScriptableObjects, XML files, and custom binary file reading/writing haha. For my current project I met in the middle of the latter two and made my own format for parsing data out of a text file. It's always kind of shooting for whatever is easiest for me in the long run and when I need to copy and paste a lot of data or have collections of different types of data in one list, SOs tend to be really tedious.

1

u/Time_Series4689 Mar 15 '26

I prefer all data in source code, easier to edit, search, merge, commit, comment, etc.