Issue #178 - Transforming The Video Games Industry

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some great long and short form content this week. How do you feel about AI, plus tutorials on creating art our own dang selves! Enjoy!

Inspecting memory with the new Memory Profiler package - In this blog, we will cover five key workflows in the new Memory Profiler package that you can use to diagnose and examine memory-related issues in your game.
Unity

5 ways to draw an outline - Rendering outlines is a technique that is often used in games either for aesthetic reasons or for supporting gameplay by using it for highlights and selections around an object. For example in the game Sable, outlines are used to create a comic-book-like style. In The Last of Us, outlines are used to highlight enemies when the player goes into stealth mode.
alexanderameye.github.io

Toony Crystal Shader - A Crystal Shader Breakdown
Sørb @SoerbGames

Creating Isometric RPG Game Backgrounds - Using Stable Diffusion techniques to create 2D game environments
talesofsyn.com

Improving job system performance scaling in 2022.2 – part 1: Background and API - In 2022.2 and 2021.3.14f1, we’ve improved the scheduling cost and performance scaling of the Unity job system. In this two-part article, I’ll offer a brief recap of parallel programming and job systems, discuss job system overhead, and share Unity’s approach to mitigating it.
Unity

Minecomb - Sweeping Mines - Create a hexagonal grid. Visualize the grid with small cubes. Touch and reveal cells. Make the grid ripple. This is the second tutorial in a series about prototypes. In it we will create a game about sweeping mines.
catlikecoding.com

Videos

The Cr[AI]tive Revolution - The Future of Art (Full Documentary) - AI is here. Artists, game developers, writers, voice actors, video creators... All creative industries are about to be rattled up like never before. What does this mean for creatives? How can you prepare? What does the future hold? In this full length (and ad-free) documentary I want to invite you to a deep dive into the topic of AI. I don't have all the answers, but we need to start having a nuanced discussion about this right now before it's to late!
Jonas Tyroller

Recreating Wind Waker Style Lights in Unity - Stencil Buffer Lights
MinionsArt

Creating A Keypad Login Screen in Unity (UI Tutorial) - Lets create a mobile phone login screen and inputting text using the Unity UI system. We'll look at create a phone UI with buttons, input fields, design and then the implementation of inputting the codes as strings, comparing and using this with Unity buttons. Suitable for Built-in, URP and HDRP.
SpeedTutor

FREE Performance Optimization / Draw Call Reducer (HLOD) | Unity Tutorial - Learn how to optimize the performance of your game by automatically combining meshes, significantly reducing draw calls using the free HLOD tool from Unity. Hierarchical Level of Detail is a great tool to boost the FPS of your game, especially when you have large view distances with complex geometry!
LlamAcademy

How Great Key Art Can Lead to Doubling Marketing Numbers - In this 2021 GDC talk, Graffiti Games’ Alex Van Lepp shares the effectiveness of good key art and why your studio should allocate resources to ensure your Steam banners are attracting visitors and converting these people into Wishlists and purchases.
GDC

How Machine Learning is Transforming the Video Games Industry | AI 101 - Artificial intelligence has been adopted in many ways in the games industry over the past 30 years, but machine learning has never been considered practical until now. In this episode of AI 101 we discuss the fundamentals of what ML does, how it differs from traditional AI, what deep learning actually means, and the ways in which it is being put to good use in the industry.
AI and Games

Expert Game Devs Importing 2D Animations into Unity | Townseek - Jorge M. Carvalho showcases how he imports Jose "Moski" Sanchez' art and animations into the game. We get a closer look at how they use animation overrides sprite atlas and memory profiler to keep things optimized.
Unity

Responsive Fortune Spin Wheel - Unity Tutorial - Easy to use and customize Fortune Spin Wheel for your game with just a few lines of code.
Hamza Herbou

Assets

Synty's POLYGON Game Dev Assets Bundle 3 - Build your 3D game with these stylish, versatile assets.

Add some low-poly, high-style 3D characters, environments, and props to your game with our latest POLYGON bundle from Synty! This flexible and eclectic library of over 5000 assets will help you develop games for a variety of genres in Unity and Unreal. Create treacherous dungeons, Wild West worlds, and wartorn battlefields. Prototype natural forests and bustling cities, and help support charity with your purchase!

Your purchase of this bundle will help support Direct Relief in their ongoing humanitarian response efforts for the people of Türkiye and Syria impacted by the recent tragic earthquakes.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Learn To Make Survival Games With Unity - Create Your Own Survival Games
Learn to build your own survival games with Unity! Inspired by AAA games like Rust, Valheim, and the upcoming ARK 2, these courses will help you master developing inventories, resource gathering, base building, crafting, AI enemies, and more—no prior experience required.

Plus, you’ll support NPower with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Free Background Music - Hi ! I'm a game music composer, and here's a playlist of Creative Commons tracks that you can use for free, even in commercial projects ! Hope it helps
LonePeakMusic

SdfPostProcessor.cs - Unity asset post processor for converting images to Signed Distance Fields on import
mattdavisgames Open Source

Unity Excel Importer - Extension to auto import data from xls, xlsx to custom ScriptableObject in Unity Editor.
Add the following entry to Packages/manifest.json or Package Manager.
mikito Open Source

Scene Reference Attribute - Unity C# attribute for serializing component and interface references within the scene or prefab during OnValidate, rather than using GetComponent* functions in Awake/Start/OnEnable at runtime.
KyleBanks Open Source

RayCursor: A 3D Pointing Facilitation Technique based on Raycasting - This is a Unity Project containing the source code and prefab for the pointing technique RayCursor.
LokiResearch Open Source

AltTester Unity SDK - AltTester Unity SDK is an open-source UI driven test automation tool that helps you find objects in your application and interacts with them using tests written in C#, Python or Java.
alttester Open Source

Deform - A fully-featured deformer system for Unity.
Keenan Woodall Open Source

UABEAvalonia - c# uabe for newer versions of unity
c# uabe for newer versions of unity Open Source

Multi Scene Tools - Unity Multi Scene Management Tools for faster and easier development
HenrysHouses Open Source

BurstFFT - BurstFFT is an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) implementation in high-performance C# with Unity's Burst compiler.
keijiro Open Source

VTween - A compact tweening library for Unity3D. Inspired by the legendary LeanTween.
breadnone Open Source

50% off Megan Alcock assets - Save 50% on assets from Megan Alcock and get a free gift in this week’s Publisher Sale.
Plus, get a free gift! Add Fresh Bread to your cart, then enter the coupon code MEGAN at checkout to get it for free. Yum!
Megan Alcock Affiliate

GPU Instance Manager - GPU Instance Manager provides a lot of batch savings to improve your game performance in Unity. GPU Instancing is a good way to improve your performance issues and also battery usages.
supremepanda Open Source

Spotlight

Beneath Oresa - Beneath Oresa, a fighting roguelike deckbuilder, takes you deep within the city to confront your foes. As a strategist, choose your cards, upgrades, and artifacts wisely, but as a fighter, turn their positioning to your advantage.

[You can get it on Steam, visit their website, and follow them on Twitter]
Broken Spear Inc.

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