Week 9 Devlog: Expanding the World & Mastering Unity Prefabs for My Stardew Valley-Inspired Game!

This past week marked another period of intense learning and foundational improvements for my Stardew Valley-like game. While it might seem like less visible progress, I focused on crucial under-the-hood enhancements, including deepening my Unity knowledge, especially with prefabs, and significantly expanding the game map.

Diving Deeper into Unity: The Power of Prefabs

My journey with CodeMonkey’s free Unity course continued this week, and I still believe it’s an incredibly valuable resource. The main takeaway for me was mastering prefabs. If you’re not familiar, prefabs are like reusable game object templates in Unity. Now, most of my game objects are based on prefabs.

Understanding and implementing prefabs is a game-changer! It significantly simplifies object management across the entire project and can even offer performance improvements (though I haven’t hit any performance bottlenecks yet, it’s good practice for scalability). This foundational work sets up a much more organized and efficient development process moving forward.

A Bigger World: Expanding the Game Map

Last week, I integrated Cinemachine for a smoother camera experience that follows the player. With that in place, I was able to extend the main game map. The world is now noticeably larger, offering more space to explore!

My hope is that this expanded environment will make the game feel more engaging and interesting, providing a larger canvas for future content and mechanics.

Conclusion

This milestone continues to be a period of intensive learning, but it’s also about laying a strong foundation through optimization, game structure, and architectural improvements. With the updated game map now in place, I’m excited to shift my focus next week to implementing a new game mechanic. Stay tuned!

Thanks for following along with this devlog entry! As always, the latest game build is available below for you to try out.

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