Hey! Does anyone here happen to know their way around Unity Timeline a bit?

[late quest]

I made a game for the GMTK Game Jam that heavily relies on cutscenes and it was my first time really diving into Timelines. Now that the jam is over, I’m trying to clean up and improve the cutscene infrastructure but I feel kind of stuck.

Here’s my current setup:

• I have one central PlayableDirector on a CutsceneManager object.
• That manager receives a custom CutsceneSegment (ScriptableObject), which contains a reference to a Timeline PlayableAsset and some metadata.
• I also have "Chapter" GameObjects in the scene, each containing the environment for a cutscene (some cutscenes share the same environment, hence the separation into chapters).

My Problem: Editing cutscenes is super clunky. Every time I want to switch to another cutscene, I have to:

• Click on the CutsceneManager
• Assign a new CutsceneSegment
• Open the Timeline window and select the new TimelineAsset manually
• Manually activate the correct Chapter GameObject in the hierarchy

Sometimes I think it might’ve been better to just make each cutscene a prefab with its own PlayableDirector and bindings, and instantiate it when needed. Editing wise that would mean that I just drag the cutscene segment in and select it in the timeline. But I'm not sure if instantiating things between cutscenes that are supposed to play right after eachother is a good thing to do. Would that be a better approach?

How do people usually manage cutscenes in Unity when you have dozens of them?
I couldn't really find many best practices online.

In short: I’m looking for a cleaner and more scalable way to organize and edit cutscenes. Any tips would be massively appreciated!

Thanks in advance 🙏

[sharp bone]

if they play right after each other then you should create a master timeline and use control tracks to drive other timelines, control tracks also can enable/disable the timeline objects and their children

and you can switch between other timelines in the scene using this arrow

you can also double click on control tracks that drive other timelines, which will open them in a nested fashion with breadcrumbs

[late quest]

the thing with the arrow only works if a currently active playable director has the specific timeline asset assigned as far as I know. That's why I can only select the active cutscene with my current one master playable director only approach 😅

[sharp bone]

yeah, I'd have multiple playable directors under a master playable director, all with their timelines assigned.
There's little reason to overload a playable director with multiple timelines unless you have a very code-heavy workflow

[late quest]

control tracks sound promising! My current game loop is basically:

1. Play a cutscene
2. Show 3 different actions the player can take
3. Show one of 3 different cutscenes based on the players decision

That might make things a bit more complicated because I can't reference a specific timeline asset directly, no?

[late quest]

I think I'll try splitting it up. Thanks for the help! I'll spend some time trying out control tracks, completely forgot they even exist ^^

[stiff relic]

Sounds like you may benefit from this package https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.sequences@2.1/manual/index.html

[sharp bone]

(note that support for the sequences package has ended/will end with 6.1)