Issue #148 - Design Polish

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Add some polish to your game! Also, learn to work with meshes, animations, find some great assets, and more. Enjoy!

Sand Balls Mechanics Implementation: The Best Way To Deform A Mesh In Unity - In this post you will learn how to deform a mesh in Unity using a real-world example. We will apply different techniques and measure performance of each approach using performance testing to find the fastest one. As a sample, we will look at mesh deformation in the Sand Balls game and reimplement its mechanics. It has a very simple concept — you need to clear the way for balls:
gamedev.center

Making an After-Image Mesh effect(Updated for URP) - I've been using this effect for dodges in Astro Kat for a while, using just one instance snapshot of the animation at the frame of a succesful dodge, and wondered what it would look like with more copies. I expected it to be way too heavy to do every frame, but it's much lighter than I expected.
MinionsArt

Time Travel - Rewinding Hexahedra, Part Two - Hexahedra's rewind system allows players to smoothly scroll back and forth through the past to rewatch what their factory was doing at any given point.
sidequestninja.com

Animation Curves, the ultimate design lever - This post will focus on working with Animation Curves via the Unity API, with the variable type AnimationCurve. In this way, they can be used to capture and store data, which is helpful for analyzing results. Curves are also compatible with ScriptableObjects, which, as discussed in the playbook, are great for editing gameplay data.
Unity

Add physics/springs to your UI for JUICE. - A self-contained tutorial! Everything you see is running within Unity. LERP scaling via GetKeyDown, springs for juice, TMP for advanced text, mouse follow particles, etc.
Mirza Beig @TheMirzaBeig

Adding Game Polish: Animating with code to bring your game to life - When building and shipping a game - whether it's your first full game or 100th game jam you are always limited by time. Time to ship the game before the next AAA game release eats up everyone's attention, time before your next milestone delivery, or time before the jam's submission deadline ends. When you have these time constraints constantly hovering over your head, adding polish might be the last thing that you want to do - especially if you're a team with limited resources. Thankfully, it doesn’t always have to be a compromise.
lootlocker.com

Stylized Puffy Clouds Shader - A quick way of getting fluffy anime-esque clouds using a simple noise and vertex manipulation. Reasonably cheap technique, perfect for eerie backgrounds.
nokdef.com

C#: IEnumerable, yield return, and lazy evaluation - Let’s talk about one of my favorite .NET features: IEnumerable.
stackoverflow.blog

Understanding the Stack and Heap in C# - This post aims to explain what the stack and heap are, and particularly their relevance to C# programs.
endjin.com

Unity Quick-tip: Billboarding with Cinemachine - Cinemachine triggers an event CameraUpdateEvent after it updates. By listening for this event, you can be sure your objects transform always updates after the camera updates.
supertorio.medium.com

How to deploy game updates with Unity Cloud Content Delivery and Codemagic - In this post, we’ll be looking at one such solution — the Unity Cloud Content Delivery (CCD) tool. The goal of this service is to use the power of the net to easily deliver data to everyone in a synchronized way and still make it easy to properly re-assemble the outsourced assets with the code and 3D scenes once inside the game.
blog.codemagic.io

Input Buffering, Action Canceling, and also forbidden knowledge - Having responsive controls is very important to make games feel fair and enjoyable to play. Input delay due to hardware is unfortunately a large factor, but there are plenty of tricks you can program into the game to make it feel more responsive.
YosiSpring

Videos

How "Bad" Balance Can Be A Good Thing - Balance in videogames is a tricky thing, no-one can ever seem to get it quite right. From AAA studios to tiny indie games, you'll always find someone complaining about a game's balance, and in particular, about how something is probably overpowered. It's a tale as old as time! But are overpowered strategies really as bad as we've been led to believe?
Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Most underrated Unity OPTIMIZTION tips that no one talk about - In this video i will talk about the most underrated Unity OPTIMIZTION tips that no one talks about.
GDev Simplified

How V Rising Works? (Sunlight Burn Vampire Player) - And of course the mechanic I wanted to explore was Sunlight. If exposed to the sun for too long you start to take damage. How you identify if the player is receiving sunlight involves some interesting trickery. There are several methods to do it, you could do it with colliders and a Raycast, however that could cause issues since the visual and colliders don't usually match. So the other approach which might be even more obvious is to use a second camera, look at the sun and see if there's anything blocking it. Doing this was really interesting.
Code Monkey

My thoughts on Unity recent events... - Ok so let's talk about this...
Code Monkey

Create Game Menu like a PRO using UI Toolkit - In this tutorial we will create simple military style menu using UI Toolkit. If you need a menu for your 2d or 3d game this Unity Tutorial is for you! We will start from scratch and finish having fully functional menu with play, settings, exit and mute buttons!
PitiIT

Assets

Blink Mega Bundles - $30 Bundle - save up to 23%
This bundle contains: Stylized Rocks, Unique AoE Magic Abilities Volume 1, and Magic Sci-Fi Sword Sounds.

$35 Bundle - save up to 84%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 bundle, plus VFantasy Portal FX, iStep, and Korea Goryeo Village.

$40 Bundle - save up to 94%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 and $35 bundle, plus Low Poly Terrain - Polaris 2020, Open World Nature Kit, Path Painter™ II, RPG & Dungeon Sounds, Fullscreen Editor, Unique Projectiles Volume 1, Auto Fence & Wall Builder, Irval the Wyvern, UMA for RPG Builder, and FPS Medieval Weapons - Ultimate Pack.

Additionally, all assets by Blink are on sale for 50% off. This passionate team is dedicated to Unity tool development and art assets, and won both the 2021 Asset Store Publisher of the Year and the 2021 Asset Store Best Development Tool awards.
Unity Affiliate

RPG Game Dev Bundle - Making a role-playing game? Did you pick up our epic RPG Maker Resurgence bundle? This massive library will be the greatest asset in your game-dev journey! Get collections of art assets including 2D heroes and characters, tile sets, icons, and more—along with RPG-worthy music, sound effects, stingers, and other versatile audio building blocks. Plus, your purchase will support the Alzheimer's Association and Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

I've made a whole Cyberpunk Game Kit with characters, environments and enemies you can use for free in any project! - 70+ Cyberpunk models (Animated character, enemies, platforms, powerups and a lot more).
QuaterniusDev

Unity Modes - Easily switch between or create new Unity editor modes! Use the same system that Unity's builtin Safe Mode does or the Standalone Profiler.
needle-tools Open Source

Snappable Meshes PCG - Procedural generation of 3D maps with snappable meshes. An implementation of the Snappable Meshes PCG technique in Unity.
VideojogosLusofona Open Source

Generic Event Bus - A synchronous event bus for Unity written in C#, using strictly typed events and generics to reduce runtime overhead.
PeturDarri Open Source

Extra Controllers - Adds support for GameCube controllers to the unity input system along with other controllers.
popcron Open Source

uAdventure - uAdventure is a platform for the development of classic adventure computer games with educational purposes.
e-ucm Open Source

Futile (2021 Edition) - Futile is a code-centric 2D framework for Unity.
MattRix Open Source

Runtime Unity Editor / Debugging Tools - In-game inspector, editor and interactive console for applications made with Unity3D game engine. It's designed for debugging and modding Unity games, but can also be used as a universal trainer.
ManlyMarco Open Source

procedural-skybox - The Procedural Skybox Designer built with Unity.
Yash-Singh1 Open Source

Save System for Unity - Save System for Unity with AOT (IL2CPP) and assets references support.
IntoTheDev Open Source

SuperTiled2Unity - SuperTiled2Unity is a Unity Package that gives you the ability to import your Tiled Map Editor maps directly into your Unity projects.
Seanba Open Source

GroundGrowing - Open Source Unity3d Planetary Terrain Editor Extension with incremental background updates via multithreading.
RichardGSchmidt Open Source

SimpleGraphQL For Unity - SimpleGraphQL is just that -- a simple GraphQL client that is mostly code based and works with Unity.
This package attempts to provide a simple API that is able to interact with a GraphQL server. Nothing more, nothing less. No complicated setup.
Also, the world could use some more Unity-friendly GraphQL libraries.
LastAbyss Open Source

FREE scary thriller/horror music & ambience "Obsidian pack" - A downloadable asset pack. Spooky thriller music, horror ambience, goosebumps giving soundscapes. All the eerie sounds you need for your mysterious project.
szajnaworkshop.itch.io

Resource: How to access 100GB+ of high quality sound effects for free - You need a good variety of high quality sound effects in your game to get people interested in and keep them interested through the course of a 30-second trailer, livestream, whatever (the actual game), etc. ​ So, I made a guide to the best resources to find and download completely free audio for your game.
occasoftware_

Krotos SFX & Plugins For Game Audio - Add great audio to your game with this library of presets and 100% royalty-free sound effects from Krotos! This bundle offers a broad and flexible collection of high-quality SFX spanning classic categories of sound design as well as two modern synth plugins. Whether you’re starting out in sound design or looking to expand your existing collection with an affordable SFX pack for post-production and game audio, this bundle is the perfect companion!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Go Home Annie: An SCP Game - A twisted first person horror adventure. As an employee of the SCP Replication Division you are tasked with testing artificially developed paranormal events. Solve puzzles, converse with anomalous entities and explore multiple paths to untangle the secrets behind the Replication Division.

[You can wishlist on Steam and follow on Twitter]
Misfit Village

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