Issue #152 - URP And More!

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Moving to URP, AI tools, and a bunch more resources. Enjoy!

Move on over to the Universal Render Pipeline with our advanced guide - Now available: A free new e-book for experienced Unity developers and technical artists to take on the Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
Unity

I've spent 5 years curating a gamedev resource mega-list, and now I've released it for free! - For a while now, I've been hoarding every gamedev resource I can get my grubby paws on. But it's a bit unfair to hoard knowledge, so I finally organized it all and brought it out to share! [Link to Reddit post]
u/notpresident35

Deconstructing Bézier curves - Graphists, animators, game programmers, font designers, and other graphics professionals and enthusiasts are often working with Bézier curves. They're popular, extensively documented, and used pretty much everywhere. That being said, I find them being explained almost exclusively in 2 or 3 dimensions, which can be a source of confusion in various situations. I'll try to deconstruct them a bit further in this article. At the end or the post, we'll conclude with a concrete example where this deconstruction is helpful. [Also, the Hacker News post]
blog.pkh.me

Unity 2023.1.0 Alpha 6 - Unity version 2023.1.0 Alpha 6 has been released.
Unity

Videos

I Created a Neural Network and Tried Teaching it to Recognize Doodles - Exploring how neural networks learn by programming one from scratch in C#, and then attempting to teach it to recognize various doodles and images.
Sebastian Lague

Unity Tips - Simple trick for less repetitive tile based levels - In this tutorial we will create an extremely simple shader graph that will allow us to place sprite texture over tilemap which will result in much less repetitive level. This is really simple trick that can make your Unity game look 10 x better. I hope you enjoy it!
PitiIT

Unity Hair Strand Based System Installation and Shader Graph Tutorial - The strand-based Hair Solution is here! Developed during the Enemies demo, it’s an integrated solution for authoring, importing, simulating, shading, and rendering strand-based hair. Create any type of human hair or animal fur, for high-fidelity or stylized games and projects. The Hair Solution is now available as an experimental package on Unity's GitHub. Requires Unity 2020.2.0f1 or later.
Binary Lunar

Let There Be Light (And Shadow) | Writing Unity URP Code Shaders Tutorial [2/9] - Have you ever wondered how lighting and shadows work in Unity? Or, do you want to write your own shaders for the Universal Render Pipeline, but without Shader Graph? Either because you need some special feature or just prefer writing code, this tutorial has you covered.
Ned Makes Games

Why horses are so hard for video games to get right - If a horse is in a video game, that means someone busted their butt to get it there. Horses are WEIRD — they're massive animals with weird bendy joints and many, many gaits. It's no wonder why so many games choose to simply treat them as transportation. Even so, some games go the extra mile to make horses unique and meaningful to the gameplay — and they benefit from it massively. Here's why horses are so difficult to get into games, and what we're missing out on when horses aren't given their due.
Polygon

How Barks Make Videogame NPCs Look Smarter | AI 101 - It doesn't matter how intelligent your videogame AI is if the player doesn't understand it. One of the simplest and most effective ways of communicating intelligence is simply to have it say what it thinks aloud - a concept known in game development as a 'bark'.
AI and Games

Cinemachine Basics - Transposer & Composer for Top-Down Object Targeting | Unity Tutorial - Still manually controlling your Camera position & rotation? Consider using Cinemachine to simplify your workflow, get smooth, high quality transitions, all with low effort! Learn about the Transposer and Composer for a top-down style game in this Unity Tutorial.
LlamAcademy

Assets

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Unity Affiliate

2d Dungeon Asset Pack (FREE) - Hey , here's 2d asset dungeon pack with a lot of stuffs.
styloo.itch.io

Nav Mesh Avoidance - Custom Nav Mesh Avoidance to replace default one.
OlegDzhuraev Open Source

Aim-IK - A Unity package, to procedurally orientate the character's head (and spine) in a direction without using any animation data.
ehsan-mohammadi Open Source

Mesh Animation - Mesh Animation is lightweight library for rendering hundreds of meshes in one draw call with GPU instancing.
Mesh Animation bakes vertex positions for each frame of animation to texture. Custom shader then move mesh vertexes to desired positions on GPU. This allows draw the same original mesh multiple times with GPU Instancing. Unique animation parameters are overridden for each instance with Material Property Block.
codewriter-packages Open Source

Generic Save System for Unity Engine - Tired of writing your own save system from scratch every time you start a project? You're in the right place, this is a project i've made to be maintainted accross different projects, it's a performatic, secure and easy solution.
GabrielBigardi Open Source

Quick Build For Unity - Quickly create test builds without polluting the default build settings.
Smidgens Open Source

Safe Values - This is a small project I have been working on for anti cheating in Unity Engine. It allows you to protect your game from cheating tools but it doesn't protect its files from being ripped off.
ookii-tsuki Open Source

Gold Player - A first-person player controller for Unity, built with being user-friendly and developer-friendly in mind.
Hertzole Open Source

Gradle Wrapper Generator - Automatically generate a Gradle Wrapper (gradlew) when exporting Android projects in Unity.
gilzoide Open Source

StbImageSharpForUnity - Provides an Unity extension of StbImageSharp.
mochi-neko Open Source

Inside Gaming - Book Bundle - Discover insider knowledge on all things gaming—from design, development, and theory to the history of your favorite consoles, RPGs, MMORPGs, and more—in the Inside Gaming book bundle from MIT Press! Get fascinating new perspectives on popular games like Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft (Game Wizards; Warcraft Civilization). Take a trip down memory lane, and revisit histories of classic gaming systems, including Atari (Racing the Beam; Atari Age), the Game Boy Advance (Who Are You?), Super Nintendo (Super Power, Spoony Bards, Silverware), and the Nintendo Wii (Codename Revolution). Go inside the world of game developers with Handmade Pixels and Developer's Dilemma, and discover how games provide more than just entertainment—but insight into our values, the nature of play, and the power of storytelling—in The Art of Failure, How Games Move Us, and Values at Play. Best of all, your purchase will support Girls Who Code, dedicated to closing the gender gap in tech by preparing girls for entry-level jobs in the field.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Fashion Police Squad - Even at this moment, our fashionable city is under assault. Baggy pants, dull suits, sightings of socks with sandals. A message needs to be sent, and it needs to be sent in style... Time to serve some good ol' Fashion Justice!

[You can buy it on Steam now, and check out their website]
Mopeful Games

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