Organize your Unity project directories structure!

Organize your workplace! Unity devs do not dispose of any common solution for this issue. It’s time to change it.

Work on multiple projects, together with many developers taught me that some general solutions have to be developed due to the fact that now most frequent pattern is a mess. I have lost few hours of my life just because files were in the wrong place. One can think this is only cosmetic improvement or it can be done later. But this minor detail can improve your team work and save unnecessary confusion.

Keep your files in proper directories

This is where I could finish but… In Unity we get an empty Assets folder so we can do and use it to whatever we want. That’s what I call freedom :) But be responsible!

• Bad idea: Put everything into this folder without any order.
• Good idea: Create some directory structure
• The best idea: Create universal structure where everything has its place

But how should I prepare such structure?

Look at your last projects. Which files could be packed together? Which of them you had used most frequent?

Also think about your team. Solution should be intuitive for everyone.

I mostly work on small projects - few scenes, few team members. For bigger games I would rather adjust files per scene/level or functionality. Despite this in my case the best directory structure is as below:

|- Assets
    |- Editor //special folder
    |- Resources //special folder
    |- Plugins //special folder
    |- Extensions
    |- Scenes
    |- Scripts
    |- StaticAssets
        |- Animations
        |- Animators
        |- Effects 
        |- Fonts
        |- Materials
        |- Models
        |- Prefabs
        |- Shaders
        |- Sounds
        |- Sprites
        |- Textures
        |- Videos

Here you have full list of so-called Special Folders.We are using such order with my team from about year now and it works well. I don’t remember any situation that we needed to add some new folder (of course we use some subfolders with this)

Automatic solution

Don’t worry. You don’t have to create all these folders manually. I’m creating few tools facilitating starting up with new project. One of them is Unity Project Tree Generator.

This little plugin will generate mentioned directory structure in few moments. It will also add .keep file to each folder just because git ignores empty directories. If you have existing project with some structure created - it’s OK - it will only create new folders if you don’t have them. It will not edit or remove anything.

Of course it is your project so you can change your directory tree as you want.To do this just look at GenerateDirectory method in CreateProjectTree class.