Part 1: Clarity Before Chaos – Think Before You Begin.

If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably already nodded at least once while reading the series intro. Let’s dive into what exactly causes Unity projects to spiral into chaos, and what questions we should be asking before we create, name or move a single folder.

It’s simply the nature of most Unity projects: you’re continually adding features, importing plugins, experimenting with snippets, and building your own reusable components. Before long, the structure makes zero sense to anyone but the original team and even they end up relying on muscle memory to find things, rather than design.

Unity really doesn’t enforce any particular structure or provide any single best-practice to follow, and when you’re focused on shipping, it’s easy to push “tidy folder structure” down the priority list. Until suddenly you’re too afraid to move anything for fear of the kraken.

So, am I saying there’s a solution to this problem?
Yes, absolutely.

Is there a single solution that fits all?
No — but I’ll give you the tools to adapt the right one for every project.

Here’s the first lesson – Always ask yourself what’s important in the long-run

For any project to be maintainable in the long term we need to always ask ourselves:

• Can code be reused across projects?
• Is this my code or something I imported?
• Can new devs find what they need quickly
• Is logic separated cleanly into concerns?
• Can the structure scale from demo to full production?
• Can features be added or removed safely?

But it’s never quite that easy, is it? We always start with the best intentions “This time it’ll be different,” you say… “I’m an experienced senior developer, and I know exactly how this should be done!”
But then a deadline looms, a quick fix is needed, and suddenly you’re unzipping some GitHub utility and dumping it straight into Assets/MyProject/Level3/UsefulThingFromGit. Because it worked, you needed to catch that train and any freelancer is paid to understand your structure, right?

Well, these shortcuts, mixed strategies and uninformative structures soon add up and before long, no one wants to move a single folder in fear of waking the kraken. And your boss is now paying for an extra day or two of freelancer time just so they can familiarise themselves with the project.

So, where do we start? Arrays begin at zero, directories start at the root — and that’s exactly where we’re headed: to the top!

Next up, we’re going to learn how to best define our high-level project structure by understanding and implementing a domain-based folder structure. DDD (Domain-Driven Design) is something every developer should be familiar with, so let’s use it to bring order to our assets.