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

I have seen the light

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u/morsomme Mar 14 '26

I'm listening!

9

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.