Code Smell detection in your project

[vittorianardone]

Dear Developers,

we are a team of researchers from University of Sannio (Italy) that are conducting research on bad practices in Unity development. We are developed a linter able to indicate where is located into the code a bad smell affecting it.

The following smell may result in maintainability problems in a Unity project:
An excess of usage of public or [SerializedField] attributes (filled through the IDE's inspector) to couple "MonoBehavior" scripts and GameObjects. This is because the coupling is not visible in the source code, and any change to GameObjects or scripts need to be done through the inspector.

In your project our linter finds this problem into the following file, more precisely it contains public attributes of GameObject type:

• https://github.com/AbrahamBrookes/flingyBall/blob/master/Assets/scripts/GameMode.cs

Possible Solutions:

• Link/Instantiate GameObjects from the source code so that the coupling between MonoBehaviour script and GameObjects can be visible from the source code and not just from the Inspector.

In order to better finalize our study we are proposing this issue. If you consider it as a smell, we would like to invite you to fixing it. We would be grateful for that, and also your game ;).

If you have any questions about this issue and/or our research, please do not hesitate to contact me: Vittoria Nardone ([email protected]).