Issue #239 - Steam, Game Architecture, Retro Graphics, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Back for another week of useful game dev stuff. Enjoy!

Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter - Id Software co-founder talks to Ars about everything from Catacomb 3-D to "boomer shooters."
arstechnica.com

Death To Shading Languages - All shading languages suck. Moreover, they’re an outdated concept and they’re failing us.
xol.io

Character Tiling - Recently I have been writing some routines for a PC game that is 2D and needs some backgrounds on which to play. I had only done some space games on PC before, which cunningly only need a starfield backdrop. I used a photo I took of the Milky Way on a clear night from my garden.
uridiumauthor.blogspot.com

How I Found A 55 Year Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game - I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel. Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing “divide by two” that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.
martincmartin.com

Creating Compelling and Continuous Gameplay in a Cozy Farming/Life Sim Adventure - In the sea of games offering very similar types of experiences, creating emotionally meaningful connections go a long way in crafting a memorable experience.
gamedeveloper.com

Vegetation & Lighting Workflows For The Last of Us-Inspired Scene - Tiffanie Gauwe showed us how she created her The Last Of Us fan art, discussed her work on the vegetation, and explained how the lights were set up to emphasize the right spots.
80.lv

Videos

Steam EXPERT explains How To Make a GREAT Steam page! (Indie Game Marketing) - What makes a GREAT Steam page? Steam Marketing EXPERT Explains! [Also from Chris and Code Monkey Steam EXPERT teaches you Game Marketing for SUCCESS!]
Code Monkey

The basics of game architecture - One of the biggest challenges beginning devs face is coding their game. It's a daunting task, that you can't escape regardless of what genre you go for. But how do you approach this best, and how do you make sure you won't have your old self once you're a few months into development.
BiteMe Games

PS1 Graphics in 2024... Why? - Do we need more realism? And why are we suddenly bringing back those old-school PlayStation 1 graphics? [Follow it with How to Make PS1 Style Objects - Blender Tutorial]
The Cutting Edge

It's easy to think your code will always be UGLY! - Fluent Interface Design in Unity C# is a powerful design pattern that aims to make your code more readable and intuitive, allowing methods to be chained together in a fluid and expressive manner. Using the example of cloning an AnimatorController, this video will demonstrate how Fluent Interface can transform complex operations into clean, elegant one-liners, significantly reducing code duplication and enhancing maintainability.
git-amend

How do Game Designers make their games FUN? - In this video, we'll explore the crucial task of ensuring your game is fun, despite the challenges of subjectivity and diminishing excitement over time. We'll tackle the question of how to design a fun game by delving into the concept of 'wish fulfillment' and examining the MDA framework, which breaks down fun into eight categories.
Sasquatch B Studios

Assets

Unity and Unreal Engine Mega Bundle - Limitless creation for Unity & Unreal
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Audio Arcade - The Definitive Collection Of Music And Sound From Ovani Sound - Expand your audio arsenal. Give your project that last bit of audio polish it needs to truly shine with this bundle from Ovani Sound. You’ll get a vast collection of royalty-free music and sound FX ready to plug into your project, as well as powerful time-saving audio plugins usable on all major game engines. From masterfully crafted gunshots and explosions and music packs that span moods and genres, to music and ambiance plugins for Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine, your audio needs will be well and fully sorted. Plus, your purchase helps the Children’s Miracle Network.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

EventPlayer - Lazy event manager for unity developers! EventPlayer extends Unity's built-in Event System, provide several Components that invoke Event in specific Time, such as Delay, Repeat and CountDown, You can visual reorder, reorganize or deactive events, execute them at desired time.
Threeyes Open Source

FLIP-Fluid-for-Unity - Real-time particle-based 3D fluid simulation and rendering in Unity HDRP with GPU (Compute Shader) & VFXGraph.
abecombe Open Source

Unity-Card-Basics - This is a basic example demonstrating how to create the basis of a system to deal with a card game in Unity.
CrandellWS Open Source

UIMaterialPropertyInjector - This package provides a component that allows easy modification of material properties for Unity UI (uGUI) without the need for shader-specific custom components.
mob-sakai Open Source

unity-voxel-engine - A voxel engine written in C# using Unity3D
lischilpp Open Source

unity_browser - Open source Unity3d web browser created by Vitaly Chashin https://bitbucket.org/vitaly_chashin/simpleunitybrowser
tunerok Open Source

master-server-toolkit - This is a framework that allows you to create game servers and services for your game inside Unity. It allows you to avoid using third-party services such as Playful, PAN, or Smartfox server. This framework does not claim to be a substitute for all these systems. No way!
aevien Open Source

UnityEditorDataChartTool - Draw data chart in Unity Editor, useful for debugging.
SolarianZ Open Source

ZergRush - C# reactive library and set of tools for Unity development.
CeleriedAway Open Source

UnitySteamBuildUploader - Editor tool to help you connect to steam and upload builds without hassle
JamesVeug Open Source

ObservableCollections - High performance observable collections and synchronized views, for WPF, Blazor, Unity.
Cysharp Open Source

RuntimeUnitTestToolkit - CLI/GUI Frontend of Unity Test Runner to test on any platform.
Cysharp Open Source

50% Off Opsive Assets - Publisher Sale - Developing with Unity since 2010, Opsive helps you create amazing games using their top-rated assets and support. PLUS get Omni Animation - Core Locomotion Pack for FREE with code OPSIVE2024
Unity Affiliate

Spotlight

Reflex Unit : Strike Ops - Tactical Helicopter Action! Featuring diverse missions; stage daring rescues, manage resources, assault enemy bases and fight back against a sinister enemy. Strategic single and multiplayer gameplay, balance your aircrafts speed, firepower, fuel and load capacity to overcome challenging missions.

[You can wishlist it on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
ROBOSARU Games

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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