Issue #129 - Tips And Polish

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

It's the usual grab-bag of topics this week including a tips, tutorials, tools and more. Enjoy!

How to Make Wordle in Unity (Part 1): Creating Wordle - As we write this guide, it’s early February 2022. And the word game Wordle is seriously viral. It’s challenging and creative, but extremely simple.
It’s easy to learn, but hard to master. And the colorful way it shows your results (without giving away answers) is endlessly shareable. So that’s why it’s proving so popular.
And that’s why we decided to write this guide to creating Wordle puzzles in Unity 2020.3.25f1. As well as showing you how to make the game in Part 1 of this guide, we’ll also cover implementation, feedback, and polish. After that, in Part 2 we will demonstrate how to use LootLocker to improve the Wordle experience with a few features that the original game did not have including persistent player accounts, friend lists, and global leaderboards.
lootlocker.io

Marketing Your First Indie Game: 12+ Tips from Developers - According to experts, very few indie games succeed, with roughly 1% of game developers making a profit. But don’t despair. Anna, from Kevin.games, is here with the ultimate guide of game self-promotion strategies!
blog.gamedev.tv

10 Tips for Writing Better Mobile Game Dialogue - 10 Tips for Writing Better Mobile Game Dialogue... but feel free to apply them to any kind of game dialogue. Brought to you by someone who's spent 16 years writing and thinking about impactful game dialogue.
gamedeveloper.com

Tutorial How To Make An Interactive Grass Shader In Unity - You will learn how to write a geometry shader to generate blades of grass and make it interact with objects moving through it. This tutorial is the step-by-step guide on how to add interactivity to the grass shader.
gamedev.center

How to bake perfect hard-surface normals in Blender (2022 Tutorial) - I told myself to once for all learn how to bake hard-surface normals without struggling. Spoiler: there will always be some struggling because there's no simple solution to the problem.
Habrador

Feature highlight: IL2CPP runtime performance improvements in Unity 2021.2 - In Unity 2021, we’ve made a number of improvements to speed things up when using the IL2CPP scripting backend. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key changes that’ll make your code notably faster.
Unity

Cube Sphere - This is the sixth tutorial in a series about procedural meshes. This time we first create a cube and then transform it into a sphere.
catlikecoding.com

The AR Companion app is now available - Find out how to capture data and edit AR scenes directly from your mobile device with AR Companion. Then send your content to Unity to finish building the AR app you’ve always envisioned.
Unity

Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 8 - Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 8 has been released.
unity3d.com

Videos

Creating Search Windows in the Unity Editor - Long dropdown lists in the Unity Editor are painful. Let's improve them, by converting them to Searchable Windows instead!
Game Dev Guide

Remote Config | Unity Gaming Services - Check out our latest workshop that walks you through Unity’s Remote Config. Remote Config allows you to update your live game content remotely and in real-time. Launch new features, test functionality, or make general modifications without requiring app updates or code changes.
Unity

3D Grid Building System - Unity Tutorial | City Builder, RTS, Factorio - An easy 3D Grid Building System in Unity using tilemaps. Without custom grid! How to make grid snapping, building placement, rotations - in this tutorial.
Tamara Makes Games

Unity Basics - LineRenderer - In this video I will show you how to use the LineRenderer component in Unity as well as demonstrate what all of the settings do.
MetalStorm Games

What's The Point of a First Level? - Games only get one chance to make a first impression. The first level in any game has responsibilities to the player that it can't get away from, but with that comes opportunities to hook in a player for the long term. Great first levels are a combination of a crash course and a sales pitch, but how any game balances those two can determine whether their players stick around for the long haul. Let's talk about some techniques that games use to figure out how to teach, and what to showcase.
Design Doc

Assets

Asset Store Lightning Deals! - Each Lightning Deal asset will be available at a deep discount for a limited number of users. During this promotion, each included asset will have 20 licenses available at 70% off, 20 at 60% off, and a variable number of licenses available at 50% off. Once those have been claimed, the asset will no longer be a Lightning Deal.
Unity Affiliate

Tyre generator (Free) - Hi my fellow friends here is another amazing asset done in blender geometrynodes.
flexdigitalpottery.gumroad.com

Unity Asynchronous Image Loader - Asynchronous Image Loader for Unity.
Looooong Open Source

BlazePoseBarracuda - BlazePoseBarracuda is a human 2D/3D pose estimation neural network that works with a monocular color camera.
creativeIKEP Open Source

Advanced Dungeon Generator - FREE - Advanced Dungeon Generator is a modular system that allows you to design your own procedural dungeons, with it you can create unlimited scenarios while remaining as natural as possible. [A paid version is also on the store if you wish to contribute to the developer]
Oscar Vezz Affiliate

ScriptableObjectWizard - This is a tool for anyone who's tired of having to add [CreateAssetMenu] to all scriptable objects they make. A simple editor window that allows you to create an instance of any concrete type that inherits from ScriptableObject. It features an assembly filter and a search function, to speed up the asset creation process.
GiovanniZambiasi Open Source

URPOcean - Ocean wave effects on Universal render pipeline, Suitable for mid-range mobile devices;
bearworks Open Source

RPGCore - RPGCore is a toolkit for producing games and mechanics in C#.
Fydar Open Source

Regulus Remote - This is server-client connection framework, available for Unity development.
jiowchern Open Source

Morpeh - Fast and Simple Entity Component System (ECS) Framework for Unity Game Engine.
scellecs Open Source

ZeroFormatter - Fastest C# Serializer and Infinitely Fast Deserializer for .NET, .NET Core and Unity.
neuecc Open Source

Autonomous Driving in Unity using ML Agents - A simulation model using Unity and MLAgents to explore a solution for lane keeping in autonomous vehicles. The purpose of this project is to explore deep learning in simulation environment and explore Unity's ML-Agent toolkit.
grantgasser Open Source

UnityEditorJunkie - Unity code that gets you that sweet editor scripting fix. Unity did a pretty good job building out a massive editor... but there are a few holes. Lets fill them one by one.
roboryantron Open Source

Debugging - Editor debugging utilities for Unity. All of these methods are accessed through DebugUtils..
vertxxyz Open Source

PlayerPrefs Editor for Unity 3D - Tool extension for the Unity Editor that enables easy access to the player preferences over a simple UI. Allows to view, add, remove and modify entries on the development machine.
Dysman Open Source

Ltcgi - Optimized plug-and-play realtime area lighting using the linearly transformed cosine algorithm for Unity/VRChat. Free to use with attribution.
PiMaker Open Source

NativeWebSocket - This is the simplest and easiest WebSocket library for Unity you can find!
endel Open Source

Unity Audio Manager (UAM) - Used to play/change/stop/mute/... one or multiple sounds at a certain circumstance or event in 2D and 3D simply via. code.
MathewHDYT Open Source

Toast UI for your Game messages - A powerful,Customizable, and esay-to-use Toast UI for Unity.
herbou Open Source

Unity Auto Save - Add a simple auto save feature to Unity which fires every set interval.
Matthew-J-Spencer Open Source

MAD 3D Text Editor - Easily create and modify 3D text in editor for any game using pre built fonts or create your own by dragging and dropping your 3D models into a font scriptable object.
madferretdd.itch.io

Size References - On scene (editor-only) game objects with real world scales to help designing realistic sized scenes.
heisarzola Open Source

OmniShade - Mobile-Optimized Shader - Fully-featured AAA quality shader, optimized for mobile devices. Packed with all the latest techniques, yet blazingly fast due to a progressive system of calculating only what it needs to. [Currently 50% off]
OmniShade Affiliate

Terrain Layer Sampler for Unity - Scripting functionality to efficiently read terrain layer weights in realtime.
staggartcreations Open Source

Spotlight

Rot In A Porcelain Dream - Rot is a 2.5D tag-team action adventure that combines exploration and fighting game mechanics. Explore a dying, dark fantasy world warped by powerful personas known as beacons. Fight, survive, save your home, and watch as the world around is changed as the powers of the beacons strengthen or weaken...

Rot brings together the unique combination of a tag/assist style combat system inspired by the tag-team subgenre of fighting games with strategic, methodical combat inspired by the souls series. Players will get to master three powerful heroes with an arsenal of unique combos, abilities, assists, and ultimate attacks.

[You can follow along on Twitter and wishlist on Steam]
Yamo Studios

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