Issue #198 - Design, Shaders, AI and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some great design resources, shader tutorials, and lots more. Enjoy!

The Level Design Book - The Level Design Book gathers level design knowledge for 3D video games in an approachable, up-to-date, and critical way. It is for designers of all experience levels and game engines. [Also check out the Game design wiki]
book.leveldesignbook.com

Open sourcing AudioCraft: Generative AI for audio made simple and available to all - Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or an indie game developer populating virtual worlds with realistic sound effects and ambient noise on a shoestring budget. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest Instagram post with ease. That’s the promise of AudioCraft — our simple framework that generates high-quality, realistic audio and music from text-based user inputs after training on raw audio signals as opposed to MIDI or piano rolls.
Meta

Help the Library of Congress Create Video Games that Improve Public Knowledge of Civics - The Library of Congress is sponsoring a challenge to help improve public knowledge of civics – that is, the rights and responsibilities of citizens – by asking video game developers to create fun, lightweight video games related to civics that incorporate Library of Congress resources. The Library will award a cash prize of $20,000 for the winning entry, $10,000 for the second-place entry, and $5,000 for the third-place entry.
blogs.loc.gov

Occluding Contour Breakthroughs, Part 1: A Surprisingly Hard Problem - The occluding contours of a smooth surface let you render 3D objects in many different artistic styles, such as this pen-and-ink hatching style:
aaronhertzmann.com

How to instantiate a prefab in ECS? - “Yeah, DOTS is great and all but how do you spawn a prefab?” That made me chuckle because I understand what he’s talking about. Spawning an instance of a prefab is trivial in normal Unity C#. It’s still doable in DOTS but takes a few more steps. There are a lot more of these trivial stuff but hard to do in DOTS.
COFFEE BRAIN GAMES

How to make nature shaders with Shader Graph in 2022 LTS - In this blog, we explore how to create two distinct nature shaders using Universal Render Pipeline (URP) in 2022 LTS. We also take a closer look at a stylized water shader and a semi-realistic sand shader. The assets will be released with the new URP 3D sample scenes in the Unity Hub later this year.
Unity

Bouncy Ball Shooter - Bouncing in a Wrapping 2D World. Spawn balls and bullets in a wrapping 2D world. Synchronize native data and prefab instances. Implement wrapping 2D physics with soft bounces. Smooth animation with time extrapolation and interpolation. Make the player follow the cursor and shoot backwards.
catlikecoding.com

Videos

Making V Rising - Join Live Content Manager, Hasan Al Salman and Director of DOTS and Multiplayer, Laurent Gibert as they co-host an in depth spotlight with two of the developers on the massively popular V Rising. We cover subjects such as why they chose Unity and DOTS, World Editor Tools, Hot Reloading, Sun systems, Voice chat and more!
Unity

Unity - Water Surface Ripple Effect Tutorial - In this video, you will learn how to create a water surface ripple effect. This effect can be combined with the water surface shader we made previously to make the water look more realistic.
帕羅 Paro

DISSOLVE Effect using Shader Graph (Unity Tutorial) - In this 2D Unity tutorial, we'll create a REALLY nice Dissolve effect using Shader Graph. After we get the base effect done, it's really easy to add even more tweakable options to get your effect looking unique and stylized.
Sasquatch B Studios

Unity | I made an even better Interactive Grass Shader + Tool - hi everyone welcome to this third grass system video. In the first video I introduced my grass painting tool which at the time used a geometry Shader and in the second video I talked about converting it to a compute shader and adding more improvements, and now I'm back with a new version with even more features and improvements
MinionsArt

What Makes A Good Boss Rush? - Boss rushes are prone to feeling like filler content in a video game. It’s very easy to slap in some bosses back to back, call it a day, and get an underwhelming segment of a game. Not that that never works, but designing a great boss rush requires a delicate touch to avoid feeling like a game is repeating itself. Let’s talk about how to get the band back together and design a top-tier boss rush.
Design Doc

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

Spectacular Sounds & Marvelous Music Bundle - A universe of sound at your fingertips. Looking to add some pro-level audio to your game, app, or video project? This bundle of expertly crafted audio assets has the sound effects, voices, ambient sounds, and background music you’ll need to bring a layer of aural polish to your creation. You’ll get the hum and whizz of arcane energy, the crisp flutter of a stack of bills, and weapons fire and melee clanks galore. Get 10,000+ SFX files and 20+ hours of music to cover every genre—even background tracks for your UI—valued at over $900, and support the work of SpecialEffect with your purchase.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

InspectorCapture.cs - Adds method to save the whole inspector to a screenshot
markeahogan Open Source

UnityScreenNavigator - Library for screen transitions, transition animations, transition history stacking, and screen lifecycle management in Unity's uGUI.
Haruma-K Open Source

kDecals - Projection Decals for Unity's Universal Render Pipeline. kDecals is a system for definition, placement and rendering of projection Decals in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline. It comes with Lit and Unlit Decal types by default and supports custom Decal shaders using a predefined Shader Library. kDecals supports Decal creation in Editor and runtime and supports pooling of runtime decals by default via kPooling.
Kink3d Open Source

QuickEye-Utility - Serializable Dictionary and Time types. Customizable Unity window title, and the best singleton implementation for Unity.
ErnSur Open Source

basic-computer-games - An updated version of the classic "Basic Computer Games" book, with well-written examples in a variety of common MEMORY SAFE, SCRIPTING programming languages.
coding-horror Open Source

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-project-pin-board - Allows you to pin commonly used assets on the window, so you can find them quickly. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!
ichenpipi Open Source

Splashdown - A Unity open-source splash and icon tool that will generate custom icons with user-provided text. Allows for dynamic scripted content and to be incorporated into your build pipeline.
Ale1 Open Source

ProbeGridAndCut (FREE) - Make a grid of Light Probes, then Cut unwanted ones. ProbeGridAndCut is a free editor extension that helps on the demanding task of place Light Probes into the scene. It lets you generate a grid of light probes, and then you can delete unwanted ones with provided tools.
SpockBauru Affiliate

Unity-Editor-Toolbox - Improve usability and clarity of key features in Unity Editor for better workflow!
arimger Open Source

Unified-Universal-Blur - Unified Universal Blur allows you to display blurred version of the screen, usually for translucent UI effects.
lukakldiashvili Open Source

fpscontroller - This Q3-inspired first person controller is made with two goals in mind:
Arcade feeling facilitates strafejumping / bunnyhopping, allowing easy-to-play-hard-to-master movement. It uses similar movement logic used in quake / halflife games to achieve oldschool feel.
atil Open Source

Animation-Repathing - Feature rich Unity editor tool to help streamline the process of changing the paths of animations.
hfcRed Open Source

UnityDbgDraw - DbgDraw is an API that provides the ability to render various 2D and 3D shapes for visual debugging purposes. It's similar to Unity's Gizmos and Handles API's.
pschraut Open Source

com.dada.commander - Commander is a tool for your Unity game that makes it easy to create cheat commands.
ainurdada Open Source

UnityHeapExplorer - Heap Explorer is a Memory Profiler, Debugger, and Analyzer for Unity. This repository hosts Heap Explorer for Unity 2019.3 and newer versions.
pschraut Open Source

50% off Hovl Studio - Publisher Sale - Get 50% off Hovl Studio assets. For seven years, Hovl Studio has been making quality effects and video tutorials for Unity game developers. PLUS, get Magic swords VFX for FREE with code HOVL
Unity Affiliate

Toon Shader MatCap Pack (Free Download) - This is a FREE pack of 40 MatCap toon style textures compatible with any 3D software (C4D/Blender/Maya). It includes many different styles of toon style textures like halftone, cel shader, Spiderverse/TMNT, and watercolor!
eyedesyn.gumroad.com

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

Spotlight

Sunkenland - A Waterworld themed survival game. Explore sunken cities, build your base, craft items, trade and fight pirates as you struggle to survive on an aquatic post-apocalypse world plagued by hunger and violence.

[You can get early access on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Vector3 Studio

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