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Comment by munchbunny | Hacker News Reader

For getting web apps up fast, React, Firebase, Git, and Heroku. It's a well trodden path so the tooling is simple and the components are reliable.

For my VR stuff... Unity is really the only choice that's fast to get off the ground, so Unity it is.

For hacking together backend heavy stuff, Python. Flask if I need to expose an API endpoint. Postgres if I need a real database, sqlite if I don't. Deployed to my evergreen playpen virtual instance via Docker containers because it's, once again, a well trodden, simple, and undramatic path.

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Do you use firebase auth? It looks really good. I just had a heck of a time implementing user management and a couple oauth2 flows and it looks like it could have saved me a bit of time. My only concern is their plans are a little weird, it just jumps from free tier to jumbo size, wish there was something a little in between for less money.

Yup, I do use it. From a security and convenience standpoint it's just so much easier than whatever I could have come up with myself. But yes, the pricing sucks. I don't have a good answer there unfortunately.

I built a boilerplate for React+Firebase (including search, auth, and Stripe): http://getfirefly.org/

I'm curious, I've started doing development in unity but I find myself unaware of good patterns to use, any pointers to advice on unity design patterns?

Unity is pretty squarely in the space of event based programming, so whatever design patterns apply there are generally useful. Because of stuff like animations making timelines unpredictable, you should embrace the event based approach as much as possible.

Other than that, try your best to decouple game state from the actual objects that are flying around. You will never do it 100%, but the more egregious Unity code I've seen all shares the trait that they just jammed variables into scripts for objects without really thinking about how they'd tie together a distributed network of objects that have no easy way of addressing each other. The answer is that you don't: you still need a central game state.

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