This should be no secret, but...

Game development is a life-lasting career plagued with mountain-sized obstacles along the way. It is complex and you might lose chunks of your sanity in your journey.

The bright side? The #gamedev trail hides valuable treasures and sexy rewards.

As you advance in the game development career, you learn new patterns, processes and tricks that over time will become part of your development style.

The downside to learning is that we also unlearn. Well, kind of.

The useful insights you and I gained years ago are probably hidden by now in the darkest corners of our minds, desperately waiting for the right trigger to surface.

Only that... some of these mental triggers won't happen when you need them.

I sometimes see myself and others doing the same performance-ruining mistakes over and over again, project after project.

And this doesn't happen because of a lack of knowledge, but rather due to forgetting small thingies.

And so I work hard to make knowledge more explicit for me and for others. By documenting your learnings, you'll help not only others but also your future self.

I mean, just look at this blog...

A checklist is a useful piece of documentation that will give you quick reminders about often-forgotten facts. You can quickly scan over it and perform a sanity check in just a few minutes. That's why checklists are so powerful.

And you should have one. Now, I can't force you to write a checklist — that's my job—, but at least consider using one. In this post, you'll be tapping into my personal unity performance checklist.

As always, these are suggestions for you to think about. These tips have gotten me far in the industry of game performance, but you must evaluate whether they make sense for your game and for you.

Ideally, you should always measure your changes.

Don't attempt to sue me if following my advice steals a millisecond from your game (but feel free to toss in some coin if you gain it).

To keep it simple, I divided the checklist in three main sections: CPU, GPU and Memory/Loading Times.

At the end of the post you'll have the chance to get an extended version of the list that includes further explanations and online references.

Pay attention to the star symbol (*). These usually mean: be careful with that change, as it will have negative side effects in other unity performance areas.

If you're curious about the importance of checklists, check out The Checklist Manifesto (no referrals — that's why I'm poor).

Have fun, my friend.