Issue #200 - Develop Faster

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Jam packed for issue 200, blender tips, development process tips, AI and asset packs, plus lost more. Enjoy!

Unity Assembly Definitions Explained: How to Organize and Control Your Code - Assembly Definition Files (asmdef) in Unity is a powerful feature that helps manage and organize your codebase.
marcomignano.com

Cross-platform HDR display support in Unity 2023 - Greetings from the Unity Graphics team. We’re glad to announce that as of Unity 2023.2.0a18 (and 2023.2 beta), the Unity Editor and Standalone Players now provide cross-platform support for HDR output and full compatibility with the Universal and High Definition Render Pipeline.
Unity

How Rubber Duck Games developed a boss fight in Evil Wizard - Rubber Duck Games, one of the esteemed GDC 2023 Best in Play winners, uncovers how they created a compelling boss fight. This guest blog sees team members Banki and Sergio Wajswol guide you through the entire journey, from design and prototyping to animation, testing, balancing, and finalizing the visual effects and audio for Evil Wizard.
Unity

Leveraging SerializeReference for Flexible Commands in Unity Game Development - In the fast-paced world of game development, time is often a precious commodity. Finding efficient solutions that offer quick testing and flexible configuration becomes paramount. We, too, faced this challenge and discovered a potent approach that not only met these demands but also allowed us to customize our domain’s behavior extensively.
Gbros Games Studio

Frequently Asked Questions About Steam Next Fest - I have been to just about every one of these Steam Next Fest (SNF) Q&As and the same questions keep getting asked so I thought I would just write them out here as a reference.
howtomarketagame.com

Oversimplified History of Retro Game Consoles for Programmers - It is always useful to look at the past to understand the current state of affairs. This article is a brief overview of the history of game consoles from a programmer's perspective. Let's understand the limitations and the driving forces that helped shape the technologies we use today in modern game development.
pikuma.com

Moving faster - This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding. I don't think I'm very fast in an absolute sense, but I'm much much faster than I was 5 years ago. These are the things that I think made the most impact.
scattered-thoughts.net

Throw away your first draft of your code - The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away. I'm serious.
ntietz.com

Unity 4D #2: Extending Unity to 4D - This article will show how to extend Unity to support four-dimensional geometry. This is the second article in a series of four, and the first one which will probably start discussing the Mathematics and the C# code necessary to store and manipulate 4D objects in Unity.
alanzucconi.com

Videos

Bullet Hell Patterns for Beginners: Coding Your First Bullet & Spawner in Unity - Welcome to Sidereum Games! In this beginner-friendly tutorial, I'll guide you through coding your first bullet and bullet spawner in Unity, helping you create your own bullet hell patterns with simple coding techniques.
Sidereum Games

The 3 Types of Detective Game - Back in 2017 I made a video about detective game design. And I had to dig deep to find good crime-solving games to talk about - like old PC games from the 90s and obscure indie titles on Itch. But in the last five years we've seen an explosion of great detective games - so it's time to revisit the topic and ask, again, what makes a good detective game?
Game Maker's Toolkit

Improve the Feeling of Speed in Your Game and Make It Appear Faster! - In this video, I'll cover GAME DESIGN and PROGRAMMING aspects for giving the feeling of SPEED, along with a system to add speed effects progressively based on speed. Perfect for both beginner and more experienced developers. Join us and unlock the secrets to making your game feel faster and more exciting!
Anzy

Coding Boids (Flocking Simulation) - Boids is an algorithm developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. It aims to emulate the flocking behavior of birds by applying three simple rules: separation, alignment, and cohesion. In this video, we go over the process of building a boids simulation in Unity.
Suboptimal Engineer

3 Essential Unity3D Debugging Techniques - Today we're diving into the world of debugging in unity if you're just starting out in game development or just aren't familiar with debugging then hang around because these essential techniques will save you a ton of time and frustration.
Jason Weimann

You NEED to POLISH your games! (and not just at the end) - When should you add polish to your games? The obvious answer is near the end of development, however that's not the only time where it makes sense, here's 5 stages when you should add polish.
Code Monkey

How I keep track of players : Noia MMO Devlog #33 - Check out how I keep track of players with logs.
Noia Dev

Vector math is EASY when you SEE it with Blender and Geometry Nodes - In this video I’m going to show you what vectors are, why they’re so crucial to understanding 3D applications, and how to use the most important vector math operations in a visual and intuitive way that I don’t think you’ll forget.
CG Cookie

Intro to DOTS Animation - Unity ECS Tutorial 2023 - In today's video I'm going to be giving you an introduction into some of the options that are available for us when it comes to implementing animations in unity's entity component system
Turbo Makes Games

Tips for Optimizing Game Assets in Blender - Reduce memory usage and computing resources to improve frame rates and enhance your creative freedom without performance constraints. The video covers topology, baking, and a bonus tip for getting more out of your texture resolution. Discover how to localize geometry, dissolve excess edges, and break up your mesh for better optimization. Explore texture baking to simplify materials, reduce draw calls, and master the art of channel packing for more efficient maps.
CG Cookie

Best books for Game Design | How to learn Game Design - Interested in learning Game Design but wondering what books to buy?
Rahul Sehgal

Assets

Fantasy And Sci-Fi Essentials For Unity Bundle - Amazing sci-fi & fantasy assets for Unity.

Propel your Unity game project to new heights of visual fidelity with this massive sci-fi and fantasy asset bundle, crafted by some of the dev scene’s most esteemed content creation studios! You’ll get all the building blocks needed to craft impressive and immersive game worlds, including a vast catalog of sci-fi and fantasy creatures, high-end animation sets for all manner of entities monstrous to mundane, stunning environment packs, and much more. As a bonus, you’ll also get a voucher for the Unity Asset Store good for 10% off your next purchase!

Pay what you want for this enormous asset bundle valued at over $2,500, and help support Alzheimer's Research UK with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Best of the Dev Days of Summer Sale - Customers now have two more weeks of savings on bestsellers from the last several weeks. Top assets from the entire summer sale have been combined into one massive second chance opportunity to grab an awesome tool or art pack at 50% off.
Unity Affiliate

Publisher Of The Week Sale - CGPitbull - All assets from CGPitbull are on sale for 50% off. PLUS get ORION Frigate asset for free with code CGPITBULL! CGPitbull offers hundreds of 3D fantasy and sci-fi assets. Discover countless models to help you develop games, apps, movies, and more.
Unity Affiliate

Mesh-Peeling - It is a mesh peeling tool in different shapes.
bunszr Open Source

NoiseBall6 - NoiseBall6 is a Unity sample project that shows how to access vertex/index buffers directly from compute shaders.
keijiro Open Source

Unity.mathx - An Extension Library for Unity.Mathematics - Extension Methods, New Syntax, Optimized Functions, and more !
LTMX Open Source

Behavior-Tree - Behavior Tree for Unity is an implementation of a classical behavior tree for Unity engine. Behavior trees allow you to easily set up a behavior switcher based on different conditions. Usually, it's used for game AI.
ZorPastaman Open Source

UITableViewForUnity - UITableViewForUnity is a componet which can be used for implementing various of list UI views with Unity engine.
zhaozilong1988 Open Source

Unity-AR-ColorMapping - Unity AR Colormapping for easyar,vuforia,maxstar, arkit, arcore
airar-dev Open Source

soft2d-for-unity - Soft2D is a 2D multi-material continuum physics engine designed for real-time applications. Soft2D-for-Unity provides a high-level encapsulation for Soft2D and offers users a range of easy-to-use interfaces, enabling users to easily implement various physical simulations in Unity
taichi-dev Open Source

very-simple-twitch-chat - A very simple plugin to connect your Unity games to the Twitch chat. It's possible to Login with just one line of code and start reading the messages. Custom settings for different environments and more complex login methods are also supported.
rothiotome Open Source

UniTyped - UniTyped is a source generator that allows typed access to data such as SerializedObjects, material parameters, tags and layers. It helps you write more concise and safe code.
ruccho Open Source

gum - Gum is a collection of tools focusing mainly on game development with the goal of getting rid of the boilerplate code.
erkerkiii Open Source

UnityExtensions - C# extension functions, attributes and editor tools for common Unity problems.
Faulo Open Source

YetAnotherHttpHandler - YetAnotherHttpHandler brings the power of HTTP/2 to Unity and .NET Standard. This library enables the use of HTTP/2, which Unity does not support. It allows you to use grpc-dotnet instead of the deprecated C-core gRPC library. It can also be used for asset downloading via HTTP/2, providing more functionality to your projects.
Cysharp Open Source

generative_agents - This repository accompanies our research paper titled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior." It contains our core simulation module for generative agents—computational agents that simulate believable human behaviors—and their game environment. Below, we document the steps for setting up the simulation environment on your local machine and for replaying the simulation as a demo animation.
joonspk-research Open Source

UnityBehaviourTreeEditor - Behaviour Tree Editor for Unity built with UIToolkit
thekiwicoder0 Open Source

MateAnimator - Animator++. Adding more features to the open sourced Animator from Unity.
ddionisio Open Source

FernNPR - FernNPR is a library for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) in Unity. It offers a variety of NPR techniques, Character Renderering, Environmental Renderering, and Stable Diffusion!
FernRender Open Source

UnityWebBrowser - Unity Web Browser (UWB) is a Unity package that allows displaying and interacting with the web from within Unity.
Voltstro-Studios Open Source

UnityTilemapMask - The mask component. Works the same as SpriteMask, but used for tilemaps.
CalmlyGrass Open Source

unity-touch-controls - Touch gestures made easy for Unity3D Game Engine.
jocic Open Source

DAPolyPaint - Polygon Painter for Low-Poly style 3D Models. Plugin for Unity.
piXelicidio Open Source

SaveManager - Save Manager is a FREE local save system for Unity games.
CarterGames Open Source

awesome-unity-games - A curated list of useful open-source Unity projects in alphabetical order.
akinmustafa Open Source

hackbox-unity - A Unity Package that leverages Hackbox to provide Jackbox-style interactive gameplay for Unity games.
ashbash1987 Open Source

Math For Programmers 2023 Book Bundle - Level up your programming fundamentals. Dive into math, machine learning, and other crucial disciplines and take your programming skills to the next level! Our latest bundle from Manning Publications will help you harness math to write better code, utilize deep learning across various languages and applications, and get up to speed on foundational concepts like functional programming, cryptography, and data structures. Pay what you want and help support Trees, Water & People with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Solo Indie Game Dev Essentials Bundle - Succeed as a solo indie game developer. Whether you're making games as a hobby or your dream is to create video games for a living, this bundle of online courses from GameDev.tv will teach you the essentials that every solo indie developer needs! You’ll learn how to use engines like Godot, Unity, and Unreal to turn your vision into a playable game, get in-depth tutorials on how to create stunning pixel art and 3D assets, and more. You’ll also get a library of asset packs that’ll help you get your projects up and running in no time. Jumpstart your solo indie dev ambitions with this comprehensive curriculum, and help support One Tree Planted with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

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

Oirbo - Explore a labyrinthian spacecraft and discover its mysteries and purpose. Help Oirbo navigate a metroidvania inspired, hand-drawn, 2D action-platformer full of secrets to uncover, areas to explore and enemies to dismantle. The choices are yours to make, how will you unravel the twisted story?

[You can get it on early access on Steam, visit their website for links to other major platforms, and follow them on Twitter]
ImaginationOverflow

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