Issue #197 - Multiplayer, Tips & Tricks, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some new multiplayer tutorials, the usual great shader/VXF magic, tips and tricks lists, plus a lot more. Enjoy!

Unity Prefabs 101: Improving Your Workflow with Reusable Game Objects - Whether you're a seasoned developer or just getting your feet wet, you've probably come across the term 'Unity Prefabs.'
blog.gladiogames.com

Insights on Indie Game Publishing from Super Rare Games - Super Rare Games' Ryan Brown explained the importance of selecting the right publisher for indie developers, discussed the company's unique approach to indie game publishing, and shared Super Rare's initial criteria when game developers submit projects for support.
80.lv

Technical art behind the raging color of I See Red - In this guest post, Whiteboard Games details the history of the studio’s first commercial release, I See Red, and shares the technical thinking that went into the game’s unique approach to color.
Unity

More capabilities to make your multiplayer game even better - In September of last year, we launched a new self-serve experience for our Game Server Hosting (Multiplay) and Matchmaker products to make it easier for everyone to get their hands on the tech that supports some of the biggest multiplayer games in the world. Since then, we’ve been hard at work creating more tools and features to help you build and run your live multiplayer game.
Unity

Welcome to Megacity: Our competitive-action multiplayer sample - We are thrilled to announce the release of Megacity Multiplayer, our new competitive-action multiplayer sample. This release marks a significant milestone for our team, as it showcases how creators can build ambitious multiplayer titles that support more than 64 concurrent players while leveraging Unity Gaming Services (UGS) solutions like Game Server Hosting, Authentication, Voice Chat, and Matchmaker.
Unity

Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh - I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. [If you like this kind of post, also check out the Hacker News discussion]
fabiensanglard.net

Three tricks with Dictionary - In this short blog post, I want to showcase two nice tricks you can do with everybody's favorite data type: the dictionary.
steven-giesel.com

Should You Do Early Access? - People always ask me, should I do Early Access? For first time developers, I almost always said no. Just release it in full. But it was just my gut level intuition telling me that. But I hate my gut. So I decided to run some numbers and figure out how good or bad Early Access is. So after running the numbers, I have to admit, I may have been wrong about Early Access, it might secretly be great.
howtomarketagame.com

Pitch Template - A bit of a different post, and it took a bit longer to put together. I hope you'll all agree it's worth the wait: a ready-made pitch template, with the blessings of folks working at several indie studios of all sizes, and folks working at two dozen publishers.
ltpf.ramiismail.com

Videos

Turning Sine Waves Into Water - Real time water rendering might sound intimidating, but it turns out most video games (Final Fantasy XVI, Elden Ring, Genshin Impact, etc.) use a relatively simple technique. How convenient!
Acerola

8 TIPS to get MORE WISHLISTS! - Here are 8 practical tips to help you get more wishlists when you participate in a Steam Festival so you can find massive success in the final release!
Code Monkey

HOW TO make a turn based AI for your UNITY game! (Devlog) - In this in-depth devlog, I'll showcases how I developed a turn-based AI system for my Unity game, Tactical Elements. I'll explain the shortcomings of the old AI and the improvements I made to create a smarter opponent. The video covers the implementation of a Minimax AI algorithm with alpha-beta pruning for evaluating and finding the best moves. I'll also play a match against the new AI system!
KHodow

7 Game Feel Tricks to Improve Your Game - If you’re looking to create an immersive, satisfying experience, game feel is the first place to start. In this Game Feel deep dive, I look into seven unity tricks and tips that can help your game feel more satisfying to play. This covers everything from camera shake to visual effects.
Dawnosaur

Unity VFX - Lightning Strike Effect Tutorial - Let's see how to create a proper Lightning Strike in Unity! With the help of Krita, Blender, Shader Graph and VFX Graph or the Particle System, you will learn the core of a great Lightning Strike
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Journey into indie game development | Unity Tales - Join us live as we talk to creator of the game Birth, Madison Karrh about here storied journey in game dev. Madison shares the reality of the ups and downs of game development and how her game Birth reached a wider audience.
Unity

“How do you start Pixel Art?”…Here’s what I did! - hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and I've been doing that for a while now, in fact it's been eight years since I first started making pixel art. I'm often asked about the best way to start pixel art and I often give the same advice which is I say to start by using a low resolution and to restrict yourself to only a few colors, and that's good advice, I do absolutely stand by that advice but it's the kind of advice that somebody gives when they've been making pixel art for eight years and have in some ways forgotten what it's even like to not know what to do with those parameters
Brandon James Greer

Debugging Unity network jitters with a potential fix - My player character that uses Unity's network transform was very jittery when synchronized over the network. In this video I highlight a networking bug that stumped me for a couple days and detail how to fix it.
Battery Acid Dev

First Person Shooter: The Definitive FPS Documentary - The ultimate celebration of the FPS genre. Join us as we revisit the greatest ever FPS games, guided by the developers who created them. Limited edition numbered run, only available until August 1st.
Available for a limited time only: First Person Shooter is a four-hour-plus celebration of the FPS genre featuring the legendary developers and artists behind your favorite games.

Reviewers are calling it "Required viewing for any fans of the genre" (Shacknews), "A treasure trove of information" (TheGamer), and "The ULTIMATE video game documentary… a must-see for all gamers!" (WASD & Beyond podcast).
fpsdoc.com/

Assets

Dev Days Of Summer Sale - The Dev Days of Summer Sale lasts for three weeks and each week, approximately 100 different assets will be on sale for 50% off.

Including: Hot Reload | Edit Code Without Compiling, Feel, A* Pathfinding Project Pro, Odin Inspector and tons more!
Unity Affiliate

Game Dev's Guide To Fantasy Character Assets Bundle - A game creator’s bestiary. Populate your fantasy worlds with fantastic characters & creatures using this bundle of assets curated for Unity game developers! Featuring fully animated customizable models, meshes, music, and sound effects for devious demons, serpent warriors, behemoth worms, and more, this bundle is packed with everything game devs need to craft thrilling encounters for your RPGs and fantasy epics. Get a monstrous menagerie, and help support One Tree Planted with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

unity-find-editor-tools - Adds a shortcut to unity on Ctrl+T (like 'Tools') to open a command palette that includes all commands that are available in the menu (including all the custom menu-items that are added in your personal project).
phwitti Open Source

A List of A LOT of Shaders (URP) - I've been exploring shaders in unity URP and I have come across MANY shaders in the past week or so. Since, I don't want many others to go through the trouble of finding shaders (like me), I decided to just list a bunch of shaders which you may like.
MST_CREATOR

Array2DEditor - Use this if you want to deal with 2D arrays easily within the inspector of Unity.
Eldoir Open Source

OpenTerminal - Open Terminal for Unity3D. execute your commands in runtime!
omid3098 Open Source

CommandConsole - very simple Command Console to create cheat codes and easy developers commands. Simply add ConsoleCommandAttribute to any field property or method
Huntrox Open Source

The Complete Blender 3D Modeling Online Course Mega Bundle - Boost your 3D modeling skills. Get access to comprehensive tutorials that’ll help you bring your dreams to life with this mega bundle of Blender 3D modeling courses from Mammoth Interactive! Featuring over 68 hours of online tutorials being made available first exclusively through Humble Bundle, this comprehensive series includes foolproof, step-by-step, cookbook-style instructions to build a variety of characters, environments, and more. Whether you're a complete beginner or looking to take your 3D modeling skills to the next level, this bundle has it all. Help support Children's Miracle Network Hospitals with your purchase
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Game Design And Puzzlecraft Book Bundle - A gamesmith & puzzlecraft masterclass. Hone your board game and puzzle design acumen with this ebook bundle packed with wisdom from the minds behind some of the world’s most revered games! Puzzlecraft will provide you a profound understanding of this fascinating discipline, along with step-by-step instructions to create your own conundrums. In Think Like a Game Designer, you’ll get expert guidance on the steps required to turn your passion into a viable career. With Mindspaces, you’ll dive into a handcrafted collection of crossword puzzles designed as therapeutic exercises, along with a series of essays to draw out your creativity.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

UnitySSPathTracingURP - Screen Space Path Tracing for Unity's URP (Universal Render Pipeline).
jiaozi158 Open Source

facticus-deploy - Deploy is a Unity package that allows you to build your game for multiple platforms and deploy them to various stores, remotely (rather than on your workstation) and with a single click inside Unity. It uses GitHub Actions and GameCI under the hood to run the builds on GitHub servers.
mnicolas94 Open Source

UnityHFSM - A simple yet powerful hierarchical finite state machine for the Unity game engine. It is scalable and customisable by being class-based, but also supports functions (or lambdas) for fast prototyping.
Inspiaaa Open Source

BetterSceneManagement - This plugin allows you to serialize scene asset in inspector for loaing via SceneLoader.
uurha Open Source

SimpleComputeShaderHashTable - This project is a Unity Compute Shader implementation of a simple GPU hash table written by David Farell which in turn is based on Cliff Click's hash table. It uses the MurmurHash3 function by Austin Appleby.
b0nes164 Open Source

Unity-Ripgrep-Search-Tool - Helper class for making your own search tools along with a built-in transient Ripgrep search window.
prime31 Open Source

50% off Rosyaev - Publisher Sale - Get 50% off Rosyaev assets. Rosyaev creates stunning 3D fantasy characters for Unity. With high-quality textures and a vast range of animations for each character, these models are great for any project, regardless of your experience as a developer. PLUS, get Skeleton Warrior / Knight for FREE with code ROSYAEV
Unity Affiliate

Spotlight

Folly Of The Wizards - Folly Of The Wizards is a comedic 2D roguelike action game that puts you in the shoes of a clumsy wizard apprentice. Join a wacky wizard cult and use unique spells to defeat enemies, explore procedurally generated dungeons, and save the world from chaos.

[You can wishlist it on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
UpFox Labs

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