[G-Production-001] Development Principles

In this article:

Overview

These development principles, inspired by the Idiomatic.js Style Guide, are a concise set of guidelines to ensure a harmonious and effective development process. They emphasize the importance of adhering to existing style guides, maintaining consistency across projects, and upholding ethical standards. Whether you're a seasoned developer or new to the field, these principles promote collaborative, understandable, and lawful software development.

Scope

This standardization cover the Unreal Style Guideline about how to work in Unreal. This standard applies to all person in in team that work using Unreal Engine.

Technical Director and Art Director was the parties whose in charge in these guidelines. While all of the team member should follow these guidelines, they can ask about the guidelines to the directors or can propose some new guidelines here and there.

Development Principles

[Production-001.1] If your project already has a style guide, you should follow it

If you are working on a project or with a team that has a pre-existing style guide, it should be respected. Any inconsistency between an existing style guide and this guide should defer to the existing.

Style guides should be living documents. You should propose style guide changes to an existing style guide as well as this guide if you feel the change benefits all usages.

"Arguments over style are pointless. There should be a style guide, and you should follow it."

Rebecca Murphey

[Production-001.2] All structure, assets, and code in any project should look like a single person created it, no matter how many people contributed

Moving from one project to another should not cause a re-learning of style and structure. Conforming to a style guide removes unneeded guesswork and ambiguities.

It also allows for more productive creation and maintenance as one does not need to think about style. Simply follow the instructions. This style guide is written with best practices in mind, meaning that by following this style guide you will also minimize hard to track issues.

[Production-001.3] Friends do not let friends have bad style

If you see someone working either against a style guide or no style guide, try to correct them.

When working within a team or discussing within a community such as Unreal Slackers, it is far easier to help and to ask for help when people are consistent. Nobody likes to help untangle someone's Blueprint spaghetti or deal with assets that have names they can't understand.

If you are helping someone whose work conforms to a different but consistent and sane style guide, you should be able to adapt to it. If they do not conform to any style guide, please direct them here.

[Production-001.4] A team without a style guide is no team of mine

When joining a team of project, one of your first questions should be "Do you have a style guide?". If the answer is no, you should be skeptical about their ability to work as a team.

[Production-001.5] Don't Break The Law

Agate is not a lawyer, but please don't introduce illegal actions and behavior to a project, including but not limited to:

Don't distribute content you don't have the rights to distribute.
Don't infringe on someone else's copyrighted or trademark material.
Don't steal content.
Follow licensing restrictions on content, e.g. attribute when attributions are needed.