Issue #160 - Get Your Game Discovered

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Double stuffed issue this week including great advice on how to market your game and improve your chance of discovery. Plus ebooks, shaders, vfx, tools and tons more. Enjoy!

Game trailers: breaking down a key discovery mistake - Derek Lieu helps us deconstruct things you don't want to do on Steam.
newsletter.gamediscover.co

How Dome Keeper Achieved A Million Dollar Launch - In today’s blog post I am going to walk you through the key moments of this campaign and how you scale from a game nobody has heard of to one that will change your life.
howtomarketagame.com

Pitching Publishers the Right Way - Lots of game developers want a publisher to help finance, market, and distribute their game. And that means approaching and pitching publishers (or investors). But it can be tough to know how to do that in the right way. Don’t worry though – we’ve been talking to Johan Toresson, “chief say-that-again officer” at Raw Fury, to get the lowdown on how to do just that.
lootlocker.com

Level up your code with game programming patterns - If you have experience with object-oriented programming languages, then you’ve likely heard of the SOLID principles, MVP, singleton, factory, and observer patterns. Our new e-book highlights best practices for using these principles and patterns to create scalable game code architecture in your Unity project.
Unity

It’s here: The complete overview of Unity toolsets and workflows for technical artists - The first of its kind, this new guide compiles detailed summaries of all Unity systems, features, and workflows for experienced technical artists. Use it as both a source of inspiration and a reference for accessing more advanced creator content to expand your skill set.
Unity

Practical Guidance To Get The Most Out Of Unity - Optimize your game creation pipeline with these technical guides for game development in Unity.
Unity

Mike Acton’s Expectations of Professional Software Engineers - In a 2019 talk/rant titled “Everyone Watching This Is Fired”, games industry veteran Mike Acton rattled off a sample of 50 things he expects of developers he works with. The title refers to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that anyone who doesn’t meet all these requirements would be immediately fired. Although his sense of humour isn’t for everyone, the suggestions are valuable. The list forms a baseline for software engineers to compare themselves against, and it’s not very specific to the games industry.
adamj.eu

Transparent and Crystal Clear: Writing Unity URP Shaders with Code, Part 3 - Hi, I’m Ned, and I make games! Have you ever wondered how shaders 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.
NedMakesGames

Rendering A Card In URP - How to make a custom shader to render cards using ‘Universal RP’ from Unity.
fronkongames.github.io

Voronoi Derivatives - Derivatives of Shortest Distance. This is the fourth tutorial in a series about pseudorandom surfaces. In it we will calculate derivatives of Voronoi noise.
catlikecoding.com

My take on shaders: Compute shaders - In this tutorial we’ll take a look at what compute shaders are, how they work, why their weird syntax is the way it is, and how to use them in a very simple use case. Hopefully, this tutorial will demystify some of the more obscure elements of compute shaders and it will get you started with making your own applications with them.
halisavakis.com

Unity Single Scene Architecture - In this series, I cover building games in Unity using a single Scene architecture and loading assets dynamically at runtime using the Unity Addressables package.
playable.design

Advanced Editor scripting hacks to save you time, part 1 - On most of the projects I’ve seen, there are a lot of tasks developers go through that are repetitive and error-prone, especially when it comes to integrating new art assets. In this two-part article, I’ll walk you through hacks that can help improve this workflow so that your next project runs smoother than your last.
Unity

Automated Testing in Unity 3D - In this series of posts, I will describe some forms of automated tests, how they become more complex with Unity, and how I personally use them (with or without Unity's tools.)
Hedberg Games

Facts about State Machines - I hold the opinion that state machines are underrated. And that's why I wrote this. The goal of this list of facts is not to teach you what state machines are or how to use them; there are plenty of other resources for that. Rather, the goal here is to motivate their usage and to highlight things about them that are frequently overlooked, but nonetheless relevant.
Chris Pressey

Unity 2023.1.0 Alpha 14 - Unity versions 2023.1.0 Alpha 14 and 2022.2.0 Beta 12 have been released.
Unity

Videos

Don't Be a Copycat: Personalized Marketing for Your Game - In this 2021 Independent Games Summit session, Derek Lieu and Dana Trebella walk through the various marketing components, the intention behind each of them, and what each marketing asset should accomplish to be successful. Looking at everything from websites, to press kits, and various kinds of trailers, they explain why you should or shouldn't consider those various elements when planning a marketing campaign.
GDC

How Game Designers Solved These 11 Problems - Being a game designer means being a problem solver. In this video, I share stories of how game creators overcame huge design conundrums, so you can fix your own issues when they crop up.
Game Maker's Toolkit

How to use Addressables FASTER Loading FREE Memory SMALL Download - Let's learn how to use Unity Addressables which allows you to have more control over memory and when your objects are loaded. The Addressables assets can then be loaded either locally or from a remote location, like your own server, or easily integrated with Unity Cloud Content Delivery which allows you to easily update assets in your game without touching the game build.
Code Monkey

How to Program in Unity: Third Person Movement Explained - Learn how to set up a third person camera and program our characters to move in the right direction!
iHeartGameDev

Let's use HingeJoint2D to create a vine, rope bridge and trap door in Unity - In this tutorial we will see what a vine, a rope bridge and trap door have in common! It turns out we can create all of them in Unity using HingeJoint2D. I hope you find it tutorial useful and fun.
PitiIT

Unity Collision Cheat-Sheet – Discrete vs Continuous - Each collision mode offers a unique collision mechanic. Knowing which one to use is key for solid gameplay and performance.
Tarodev

Sprites inside your text boxes! How to use sprites in Unity Text Mesh Pro - Setting up and using sprites in Text Mesh Pro is much easier than you might think and I will show you how. All you need is a sprite sheet and a few minutes of time. It is easy to set up and works well together with style tags, too! Typical use cases are sprites of buttons that need to be clicked, small icons of items, or even small portraits.
Christina Creates Games

Drop tables - Assets - Learn with LootLocker - Create a weighted drop system for your loot with drop tables. Can be used for things like gacha systems, rewards from bosses in mmorpgs and much more!
LootLocker

How Ray Tracing (Modern CGI) Works And How To Do It 600x Faster - In which we explore ray tracing, the reason modern CGI can look so convincing, and ReSTIR, a recent technique that allows images (and particularly animations) to be rendered hundreds of times faster.
Josh's Channel

Assets

Unity Power Tools Mega Bundle - Powerful tools can save users a lot of time and effort, increasing productivity. Until November 2, you can save more than 95% off three curated Mega Bundle sets of must-have tools.
$29.99 Bundle - Save up to 79%
Roguelike Generator Pro - Level & Dungeon Procedural Generator, Component Names, Combat Framework, and Whiskey Structure Builder.

$34.99 Bundle - Save up to 91%
This bundle contains everything from the $29.99 bundle, plus EzChart, Grid Placement System, Wheel Controller 3D, InteliMap AI Tilemap Generator, OmniShade PBR - Physically Based Uber Shader, Local Avoidance, Geometry Algorithms, and Modular Motion.

$39.99 Bundle - Save up to 96%
This bundle contains everything from the $29.99 and $34.99 bundles, plus 17 additional assets: Ragdoll Animator, Ultimate Crafting System, Physics Based Character Controller, File Browser PRO, Asset Cleaner PRO - Clean | Find References, Real Ivy 2 Procedural Ivy Generator, Blaze AI Engine, Figma Converter for Unity, HDRP Time Of Day - Lighting, Weather & Clouds, Procedural Lightning - High Performance and Shocking Lightning, Asset Inventory, See-through Shader, Stylized Rock Generator, Voxel Generator, Projectile Toolkit - Targeting and Trajectory Prediction, Spline Mesh Deform, and Gravity Engine.
Unity Affiliate

Unity HTTP Debugger - HTTP request logging tool for Unity.
ErnSur Open Source

Tilde - A remote developer console for Unity. Remotely execute commands with a web-based console served by an embedded web server.
grahamboree Open Source

MemoryPack - Zero encoding extreme performance binary serializer for C# and Unity.
For standard object, MemoryPack is x3 faster than MessagePack for C#. For struct array, MemoryPack gots boosted power, x50~100 faster than other serializers.
Cysharp Open Source

Free VFX Image Sequences & Flipbooks - At Unity Labs Paris, we are working on Real Time VFX R&D tools and as such we authored over the time some sequences using Houdini to try out our tools. Today, we release some of these sequences under CC0 license so you can use them in your projects.
Unity

ChildAnnotator.cs - Fake CSS pseudo classes :first-child and :last-child in Unity's UIToolkit with regular USS classes .first-child and .last-child.
shanecelis Open Source

Frictionless - A lightweight, simple service locator and message router framework for Unity apps.
Claytonious Open Source

Asset Management Tools for Unity - Small collection of tools for Unity used to manage your assets. Part of the DevLocker project.
NibbleByte Open Source

Unity Build System - Provide an Editor Extension which allows adding multiple build targets and batch building all, one or a subset of these targets.
Each target corresponds to a unity deploy plattform and should allow adding custom scripts to the build process to pre- and post-process the build.
kwnetzwelt Open Source

Gameframe.ScriptableObjects - Library of scriptable object types.
coryleach Open Source

Unity Baked Volumetrics - A work in progress graphics solution for completely baked volumetric lighting, meant to be very lightweight and inexpensive for VR.
frostbone25 Open Source

Randomation Vehicle Physics - This is a vehicle physics system for the Unity engine, originally developed with Unity 5.6. The most recent Unity version it has been tested with is 2019.2.9. It aims to achieve semi-realistic, general-purpose driving mechanics. This was originally sold on the asset store as Randomation Vehicle Physics 2.0.
JustInvoke Open Source

Unity selected objects History Window - A simple selection history window for Unity.
acoppes Open Source

LocalStorage - Configurable generic classes for managing local data saved on device.
dre0dru Open Source

Thumb Creator v1.3 - Free tool for unity 2021.x to easily generate thumb for Icon and model in inventory, even with transparent background, easy to use to create layerd icons with outline or shadow effects.
AndreaDev3D Open Source

EasyNoise v1.1 - Free tool for unity 2021.x that allow easy generation of noise and falloff for fast iterations Use gradient and generate texture for your terrain with just few line of code Demo script included, easy and intuitive.
AndreaDev3D Open Source

RectMask2DCulling - Custom RectMask2D, that allow to disable Culling / Softness for better performance.
mitay-walle Open Source

FMOD-Unity-Tools - A synergistic set of audio implementation tools for the interface of Unity game engine and FMOD audio middleware.
VilleOjala Open Source

SimpleAI - Coroutine-based utility AI for Unity3d. Includes an Unreal inspired perception and environment query system.
OneManMonkeySquad Open Source

Temporal Reprojection Anti-Aliasing - Source code release of the anti-aliasing solution used in Playdead's INSIDE.
playdeadgames Open Source

FXAA Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FREE) - FXAA post-processing shader.
assetstore.unity.com Affiliate

I've made a low poly market for you to use in your projects for free! - [Direct link to download]
BlenderVoyage

fuqunaga/GpuTrail - ComputeShader implementation trails for Unity
github.com

Tweening - The Tweening package provides a system for tweening object properties in Unity. A tween is an animation of a value from a start position to an end position using an easing function, providing a natural sense of motion.
zigurous Open Source

ManiaMap.Unity - This package provides components for interfacing the ManiaMap procedural layout generator with Unity.
mpewsey Open Source

Nature Manufacture Asset Bundle - Breathtaking natural environments for your game world. Build mighty mountains, lush forests, rushing rivers, and lots more outdoor terrain with this bundle of assets from the artists and developers at Nature Manufacture! This collection of realistic, high-quality environment prefabs, shaders, and more tools curated for Unity developers will help you craft gorgeous landscapes for your players. Create natural worlds worth exploring, and help support Lotus Outreach International with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

SELINI - A cryptic and alluring journey of foggy wastelands, abandoned machinery and forgotten ruins.

Blending the contrasted styles of games like Inside and Hollow Knight, SELINI becomes a 2.5d story-rich, non-verbal adventure, focused on exploring an enigmatic interconnected world that will test you with tough enemies.

[You can wishlist on Steam, and visit their website]
Cymban

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