In Unity, architecting games using scriptable objects is gaining traction. Data represented as a ScriptableObject can be decoupled from specific runtime objects, referenced liberally in prefabs, and used to streamline communication across objects.

A serialized ScriptableObject can be stored within its own asset file, within another asset, or even directly within a scene.

If you recently went through or reviewed the 2016 Unity Adventure Game tutorial and left with more questions about their design choices, this article is for you. Likewise, if you’re interested in the very different patterns you can use with ScriptableObjects, you might find this of interest too.

Two cases of interest here are how it models an RPG game’s “Conditions” and “Reactions” both as ScriptableObjects. But each piece of the game is modeled very differently: