Single Responsibility Principle
The first principle defined in the SOLID principles is the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP). This principle is probably the most simple of the SOLID principles but one that I find myself violating way too often. SRP states that every class should be defined with a single purpose and not be responsible for a multitude of things.
When I wrote the first iteration of my game, I had a singleton class called GameManager and it was massive! In my mind back then, I was proud of it. *look at this huge class that is the brain of my game, serving as the entry point and flow controller of every action possible*
Among the things I'm now refactoring is this class... I'm trying to move away from using singletons and breaking the functionality into smaller parts. For example, I now have moved my main menu into its own scene with a class whose sole purpose is to set a boolean flag to alert the next scene if the player wants to start a new game or load one from file. And another class that draws the map of the current area the player is in. And one responsible for populating an action menu based on what is available at the players current level.
At first it seemed to me that I was cluttering my project by adding so many new classes but this is where a proper directory structure comes into play. Organizing my classes (something I still need to clean up tbh) helped to alleviate some of the growing pains of using the SRP but now my code is easier to navigate and I'm not even 50% done refactoring. If something doesn't work, I know exactly where to look because my classes are generally smaller in size and have fewer methods to scroll through.
So this is my experience so far with the Single Responsibility Principle. While the number of classes you have will go up, this principle helps your code become easier to read through and clearly defines and separates functions according to a purpose. Classes aren't crazy monolithic controllers of everything with a reference to everything else. And instead they contain what they need in order to perform a specific task.
The link above is one of the videos I went through in order to understand the SRP in the context of Unity. I hope this post helps and I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences or even any questions! Next up will be the Open Close Principle
🧙🏾♂️
