Set up the whole architecture/skeleton from the start!

I am adding music and sound effects to Mathemando. And want to share my learning regarding that.

Set up the whole architecture/skeleton from the start!

That's it, thanks for your attention.

Now seriously.

My initial naive approach

I first created the game mechanics: buttons, menus, UX in general. That was fun till I realised that I also want to add vibration. Luckily for me, the game was still small. So I added a couple of vibration functions like those below.

VibrationManager.VibrateSoft()
VibrationManager.VibrateLight()
VibrationManager.VibrateMedium()

Tested the app, all was fine. The app originally only went to TestFlight and I focused on the web version and additional mechanics. I wanted to release and get feedback as soon as possible and neglected further enhancements. That led me to some problems later.

Some days ago

I realised that I want to push the game on the AppStore. Releasing is always a pain – not only because of all the things around it like making screenshots and descriptions and licences, but because I cannot just release something, it should be well done. I decided to add sound. Immediately, there was one issue. How do I add sound effect in all the places? It is now at least four scenes, multiple buttons, different interactions. I could search for each and then add the effect, then test, search and fix again and again – that would work for such a project. But that was highly ineffective.

Could you guess a better solution? 

1...

2...

3...

I could just search for places where I invoked `VibrationManager`. Easy. Apart from two problems

1. Manually adding similar lines in like 50 places
2. Noticing that I had different vibrations all over the place :screaming_squirrel: Some buttons were vibrating lightly, some softly, some in a medium fashion

While it is doable there is a better approach that could have saved me some time.

The better approach 

It consists of three steps

1. Define the UX events from the start as soon as you are developing them
2. Have some central place for UX effects. Invoke it already when developing the new elements like buttons
3. Populate the events

In other words, that would mean:

// Step 1
public static class UXFeedbackManager // Define the event in one central place
{
    public static void PlayButtonTapFeedback() // Method can be empty
}
// Step 2
// Some class with buttons
public void MakeMoreRelaxing()   
{
    UXFeedbackManager.PlayButtonTapFeedback(); // Call it. Yes, my game can make things more relaxing
    // other logic
}
// Step 3
public static void PlayButtonTapFeedback()    
{         
    VibrationManager.VibrateLight(); // Have some real implementation
    SoundManager.shared.DidTapButton(); // In general, those methods are a Facade pattern
}

What benefits does it bring?

1. If I want to change something,  I change it at one place
2. As it is one place, all the buttons will play the same effects
3. I won't forget about calling the UX effect in some place because I do it right from the start when implementing things