Unity ScriptableObject

When you first make a weapon in a shooter game, you usually give it the standard MonoBehaviour script and write everything there: damage, fire rate, ammo, shooting logic, etc. But when you start adding new weapons, lots of data duplication appears. Every prefab holds a copy of the same data. To solve this, Unity has a feature called ScriptableObjects.

According to Unity documentation, this is the official use case of ScriptableObjects:

Saving and storing data during an Editor session
Saving data as an asset in your project to use at runtime

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ScriptableObject is an independent container for saving data. Its main difference from the usual MonoBehaviour is that it does not need to be attached to a GameObject in the scene.

Let’s see the example of my basic weapon ScriptableObject:

using UnityEngine;

[CreateAssetMenu(fileName = "WeaponSO", menuName = "Scriptable Objects/WeaponsSO")]
public class WeaponSO : ScriptableObject
{
    public Weapon WeaponPrefab;
    public ParticleSystem HitVFX;

    public int Damage;
    public float FireRate;
    public bool IsAutomatic;
    public bool CanZoom;
    public float ZoomAmount;
    public float ZoomRotationSpeed;
}

ScriptableObject-s are inheriting from ScriptableObject instead of MonoBehaviour.

Let’s break this example down:

• [CreateAssetMenu] allows us to create a ScriptableObject file in our project's folder.

• Inside the class, there are no Start() nor Update() methods. Just pure data that you can manipulate through Unity Inspector. And this is how it looks in Inspector:

So you can have separate weapon ScriptableObjects in your project and manipulate them more clearly and easily.

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In summary, ScriptableObject is a perfect tool for data management, separating data (ScriptableObject) and logic (MonoBehaviour), making your project cleaner and easily manageable.