Probably, at this point, you are familiar with the basic concepts of Unity and we can safely assume that you know how to create a small video game from scratch without too many complications. You know, for projects of this size, almost everything is always under control and nothing takes too much time to be done. Basically, it is like a little paradise in the video game developer's land.
However, when the project starts increasing in size in terms of complexity, you will notice that certain tasks are repetitive or subject to error, generating a considerable amount of effort and waste of time. For example, the mechanics of your video game are quite unique and it is hard for the level designers to create content on time and without errors. This is because Unity, or the available third-party tool you use, doesn't satisfy all the required functionalities.
Sometimes, because you have more people working on the project, the lack of a mechanism to encourage people to follow standards makes your video game crash constantly.
In the same scenario, imagine that your project also requires a lot of art assets, so artists constantly add these to Unity. The problem appears later when one of the developers needs to constantly check whether the settings of these assets are configured properly to make these look right in the final build, consuming development time.
Finally, your project will be available on several platforms. However, owing to the specific characteristics of your video game, every time you make a production build, you must check whether all the settings are okay. You also need to check whether you removed all the cheat menus used by your testers and that the correct assets are loaded into each because you are preparing a trial version. Managing this becomes a huge task!
To solve all these issues, Unity provides an editor scripting API. Using this we can do the following tasks:
Modify how the Unity editor behaves, triggering our code with specific events
Improve the workflow assistance with a custom GUI that seamlessly integrates with the Unity editor GUI
Automate repetitive tasks by accessing the Unity editor's main functionalities
Understating how to use the editor scripting API to create editor scripts in your project will allow you to make Unity work for your video game and boost the productivity of the video game development.