Issue #237 - Graphics Programming, Animation, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Lots of great material to dive into this week. Enjoy!

Unity Tutorial: Particle Plexus (Part 2) - In the last part of this tutorial series, we setup the basis of our Plexus system. Lines were correctly rendered between particles, and we sampled the colour of each pair.
mirzabeig.substack.com

Serious Engine Networking - Serious Sam was built from the ground up as a multiplayer game. In a way, it's multiplayer even when you're playing the singleplayer campaign. While this idea may seem unusual at first, it's really just a clever way of abstraction. Let's explore how it works.
staniks.github.io

The Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi algorithm explained as simply as possible - The GJK algorithm is a weird way to do a simple thing.
computerwebsite.net

Scratchapixel 4.0 - Teaching computer graphics programming to regular folks. Original content written by professionals with years of field experience. We dive straight into code, dissect equations, avoid fancy jargon and external libraries. Explained in plain English. Free.
scratchapixel.com

Deep Dive: How the animation of Little Kitty, Big City rejects realism to achieve authenticity - 'Cats are an animator's dream because they're arguably the most dynamic creatures on earth.'
gamedeveloper.com

Get our first-ever guide about animation in Unity - Our new e-book,The definitive guide to animation in Unity, aims to provide animators and technical artists with an in-depth understanding of the animation features in Unity. It joins our collection of technical guides for developers, artists, and designers looking to create as efficiently as possible with Unity.
Unity

Videos

Coding Adventure: Optimizing a Ray Tracer (by building a BVH) - Trying to speed up the ray tracer (from a previous coding adventure) so that we can render some more intricate scenes!
Sebastian Lague

Quaternions to Homogeneous Points, Lines, and Planes - Points, Lines, and Planes are the basic geometric objects that games are programmed with. In "A Visual Guide to Quaternions and Dual Quaternions", Hamish Todd showed how to get rotations from lines. This talk is a sequel to Math in Game Development Summit: A Visual Guide to Quaternions and Dual Quaternions.
GDC

Let's Dev: XR Interactions & Templates - We're going to talk about XR in interactions and templates
Unity

How to work with humanoid animations in Unity - Working with humanoid animations in Unity
Unity

Classic Game Postmortem: 'Karateka' - Before Prince of Persia, there was Karateka. Released in 1984, the directorial debut of game creator Jordan Mechner was a worldwide hit, full of groundbreaking innovations in story, cinematics, music, and animation. It was also the work of an unknown teenager looking to break into the game industry.
GDC

Island Map Generation in Unity 2D (Procedural) - FREE project - Learn how you can randomly generate a Procedural 2D Island Map in your own Unity 2022 game!
Sunny Valley Studio

Event Bus & Scriptable Object Event Channels | Unity Game Architecture Tutorial - Learn how to implement an Event Bus strictly in code, and in a more-designer friendly, ScriptableObject driven “event channel” implementation!
LlamAcademy

Optimize Game Sounds: Pooling Audio Sources in Unity - Take control of the sounds in your game by pooling your Audio Sources! Reduce the number of real voices required to play a multitude of audio clips, manage their lifecycle, and enhance performance. Learn how to streamline your audio management and make your game sound fantastic with efficient audio source pooling!
git-amend

How to Make Things "POP" with Audio and Color - This GDC 2024 talk takes a dive into the process of color design as part of art in video games and compares it to the process of finding and executing the same effects in audio. It is about finding the feel, direction, storytelling and building associations to make a stronger impact with what the game is trying to do.
GDC

Assets

The $35 Asset sale - Get trending 3D, GUI, environments, and scripting assets for only $35 and save up to 65%. Plus, get an extra 10% off on orders over $60 with the code JUNE10OFF.
Unity Affiliate

UGUIVertexEffect - UGUIVertexEffect is a set of components for Unity UGUI that adds cool effects to your UI!
markeahogan Open Source

tree-js - Procedural tree generator written with JavaScript and Three.js
dgreenheck Open Source

Blender Market is 10! - We're celebrating with FREE Blender gifts!
Blender

Unity-RefractiveFlowRender - Render refractive objects in Unity HDRP (High Definition Rendering Pipeline), generating corresponding surface normals, semantic masks, depths, and refractive flow.
LJY-XCX Open Source

Toolkit-for-Steamworks-Foundation - Integrate Steamworks.NET into your Unity game project for the simplest and most robust way to bring your game to Steam. Steamworks Foundation is the "lite" version of Steamworks Complete the best-in-class Unity Steam API integration.
heathen-engineering Open Source

LutLight2D - Innovated Pixel Art Lighting
NullTale Open Source

ShapeEditor - 2D Shape Editor for Unity Editor to create complex 3D meshes out of 2D shapes with RealtimeCSG support.
Henry00IS Open Source

UnityAssetQuickAccessTool - Pin frequently used Unity objects and external files/folders to a separate editor window. An enhanced version of the Unity's Favorites feature.
SolarianZ Open Source

TMPEffects - Easily animate Unity text and apply other effects with custom tags
Luca3317 Open Source

Puppeteer - A graph based animation controller for Unity.
SolarianZ Open Source

InspectorHistory-Unity - An editor window that tracks your recent inspector history and makes it easily available.
adamgryu Open Source

AsyncImageLibrary - Load Image(Texture) in Unity without blocking the main thread, with the full advantage of SkiaSharp.
SrejonKhan Open Source

Unified-Universal-Blur - URP UI blur (translucent) effect for Unity.
lukakldiashvili Open Source

50% off gamevanilla - Publisher Sale - Gamevanilla is a small studio committed to crafting high-quality game tools and art packs that help developers turn their digital dreams into reality. PLUS, get Trivia Quiz Kit for FREE with code GAMEVANILLA
Unity Affiliate

Gamedev Market's RPG Adventure Essentials Bundle - Build stunning 2D worlds. Game makers, get ready to supercharge your 2D creations with this massive bundle, overflowing with pixel-perfect assets ready to drop into your next project! You'll get dozens of versatile tilesets, from somber cyberpunk cityscapes to idyllic medieval villages, allowing you to bring the worlds in your imagination to life. Populate them with a vast array of diverse characters, fearsome monsters, and charming critters, and add the finishing touches with slick icon packs, sound effects, and retro-inspired music. Pay what you want for this expansive toolkit, ready to use whatever your specific workflow, and help support the Michael J. Fox Foundation with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Epic Royalty Free Music Collection Vol. 2 - The makings of an epic soundtrack. Looking for the perfect soundtrack to accompany your next project? Composer Joel Steudler invites you on a sonic journey with this colossal collection of royalty-free music from his intensive catalog! From entrancing synthwave to bombastic tunes perfect to make an impact in your trailer, this collection is packed with tracks suitable for films, games, or whatever you’re working on! Plus, your purchase will support JDRF in their mission to find a cure for type 1 diabetes!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

CATATONIC GAME - Traverse the enigmatic world of Mobb Paw's New Marilyn City as Katrina the Cat. Set against a backdrop of hand-drawn 1930s art, this suspense-adventure blends whimsical rubber hose cartoons with a deep narrative and underlying themes that explore mental health and animal welfare.

[You can wishlist it on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Fred Da Dead Productions

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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