Things We Learned Along the Way

Not every insight fills its own article. Here's a collection of small lessons from the last few months — each of them cost us at least one evening.

Doorways need three blocks of height. Sounds wrong, but it's physics: our player character is a capsule of just under 1.9 blocks — but the stair-climbing logic (step offset) additionally probes 0.6 blocks upward while walking. A two-block-high door is mathematically tall enough and still too low in practice: you get stuck. Since then, the rule for ship and station building is: passages are three blocks high. Always.

Glass should be milky. Our first clear glass was technically correct and looked like a hole in the wall. Milky, frosted glass reads much better as a material in a block world — you can see that something is there. Sometimes the realistic solution is the worse one.

git pull before the feature branch. We once worked for weeks on one state while two big PRs had long been merged on the server. The merge conflict at the end was deserved. The local main branch isn't a fact, it's a memory.

Windows, long paths, and git worktrees. Unity projects create deeply nested package caches — deep enough that Windows path-length limits sabotage cleaning up git worktrees. The saving trick was as ugly as it was effective: mirror an empty directory over the stubborn one with robocopy, then delete.

The editor lies. (See the shader article in the Tech category.) What works in the Unity editor has proven nothing yet about the build.

Small lessons, big impact: each of them became a checklist line. That's perhaps the real lesson.