Issue #242 - Animation, Promotion, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Hope your game dev'ing is going well, here is another issue to help. Enjoy!

Deconstructing the Role-Playing Video Game - Today I want to write about an rpg-cli spin-off. rpg-cli is one of my fondest personal projects and I never properly documented its development, so I’ll start this post by doing just that.
olano.dev

How to Make Your itch.io Page Stand Out - why do so many developers make bare minimal changes to their itch.io pages? There’s so many games vying for player’s attention, so why do they do the bare minimum to get their attention? Today I want to look at various ways to spruce up your itch.io page.
arimiadev.com

The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds - "It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."
eurogamer.net

We got >20K Twitter followers. How we did it + what impact does Twitter have. (Repeatable) - Unlike the success of a game, a game’s popularity on Twitter has nothing to do with luck. Consistent posting over a long period of time will eventually show if your game is appealing to Twitter.
reddit.com

Deep dive: The design and implementation of object pools - Here we look at the design and implementation of pools with a focus on C## and Unity.
gamedeveloper.com

Rotors: A practical introduction for 3D graphics - When putting 3D graphics on a screen, we need a way to express rotations of the geometry we’re rendering. To avoid the problems that come with storing rotations as axes & angles, we could use quaternions. However quaternions require that we think in 4 distinct spatial dimensions, something humans are notoriously bad at. Thankfully there is an alternative that some argue is far more elegant and simpler to understand: Rotors.
jacquesheunis.com

Videos

A simple procedural animation technique - Let's design some procedurally animated animals!
argonaut

How to get started with the splines package - Splines make it easy to work with curves and paths. This tutorial demonstrates how to use the Splines package to solve common spline use cases, animating a GameObject's position and rotation along a spline, instantiating prefabs along a spline to create environments, and more.
Unity

The Animation in Resident Evil 4 - I'm on the ball, as always. Resident Evil 4 Remake came last year in 2023, and I wanted to make a light video exploring the animation of this game and its original from 2005.
Video Game Animation Study

How to NOT screw up your indie game launch. 30 mistakes in 30 minutes. | Chris Zukowski - Join Chris Zukowski, Creative Director of How To Market A Game, as he delves into the art of getting great visibility while marketing your indie game on this episode of IndieGameBusiness. Chris shares valuable insights and strategies for maximizing visibility and reaching your target audience effectively in today's competitive gaming landscape.
IndieGameBusiness®

PlayableBehaviour - C# in Unity's Playable Graph - Playables are a powerful feature in Unity, and using the PlayableBehaviour class, we're going to add audio to the Playable Graph. We will dive into how to utilize ScriptPlayable, AudioClipPlayable, and ExposedReference to create dynamic and flexible audio implementations. Additionally, we'll cover the Awaitable class to manage asynchronous operations efficiently.
git-amend

Andrew Kelley Practical Data Oriented Design (DoD) - In this video Andrew Kelley (creator of Zig programming language) explains various strategies one can use to reduce memory footprint of programs while also making the program cache friendly which increase throughput.
ChimiChanga

Can I Play Pac-Man Directly On Its Own Source Code? - Join me as I create a Quine Game Engine, which allows you to develop games as you would do it normally, except using APIs developed by yours truly, and compiling them using a custom tool that converts your beautiful creations into their most condensed form, to be enjoyed by everyone.
icitry

From Photo to Expression: Generating Photorealistic Facial Rigs - In this 2024 Machine Learning Summit talk, Hau Nghiep Phan (Technical Art Director, Electronic Arts) discusses how machine learning can improve facial animation in the gaming industry. A showcase on their solution using in-house facial rig, FaceRig, and will demonstrate how blendshapes can be automatically created to suit various character identities.
GDC

Tutorial: Active Ragdoll Multiplayer EP1 (Offline ragdoll setup sort of like Gang Beasts) - In this tutorial series I'll show you how to create an active ragdoll which works in multiplayer from scratch.
Pretty Fly Games

Assets

Unity Flash Sale! - Flash Sale Alert! Save up to 60% on top assets with new deals added every 24 hours.

Including: InControl, Easy Collider Editor, Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion, 2D Action RPG Engine: Mythril2D, FLOW: Fast Fluids, Mesh Deformation Full Collection and more!
Unity Affiliate

Blender Market's Essential Game Modding Toolkit Bundle - The essential Blender suite
3D artists, it’s time to optimize your workflows, build up your arsenal, and level up your skills with this bundle of tools, assets, and tutorials. If you’re a Blender user, get ready for a smorgasbord of invaluable tools, ranging from Retopoflow, which introduces a full retopology toolkit to the industry-standard open-source program, to Faceit, an add-on that makes facial rigging, mocap, and animation a breeze. You’ll also get a host of ready-to-use software and engine-agnostic assets, plus a curated selection of in-depth tutorials focusing on essential 3D graphics topics.
Pay what you want for this amazing package, and help support One Tree Planted with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

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-SDF-UI-Toolkit - UI components that render based on SDF. Rounded corners, outlines, SDFTexture editor.
TLabAltoh Open Source

UnitySSGIURP - Screen Space Global Illumination for Unity URP (Universal Render Pipeline).
jiaozi158 Open Source

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

Unity-Missing-Features - A bunch of basic missing features.
There are many basic features that are missing natively. This package provides many tools to fill these holes and improve productivity. It contains programming utilitary attributes that limits the need of making custom editors, or custom windows and ready-to-use components and events that limits the need of scripting, pushing further the "visual scripting" approach.
kevincastejon Open Source

UnityUIPlayables - Tracks and Clips for controlling the Unity UI (uGUI) with Timeline.
Haruma-K Open Source

Milease - Animate anything in one line of code, simplifying your UI animation development process and boosting your UI development efficiency.
MorizeroDev Open Source

Unity3D-LogCat-extension - Logcat (android logging) extension for Unity3D
dzonatan Open Source

unity-bitmasktypes - Unity generated Bitmask types usign ScriptableObjects for fast comparisons
acoppes Open Source

RTSCameraController-Cinemachine - A RTS style Camera Controller for Unity 3D's Cinemachine system.
Nickk888SAMP Open Source

All About Gaming Book Bundle - The world of gaming revealed. Ever wondered what it's like to be a game designer? Curious about the origins of your favorite video and tabletop games? This wide-ranging library from MIT Press takes you behind-the-scenes of the gaming world! Discover the colorful histories of gaming stalwarts like Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, Nintendo, and Atari. Dive deep into seminal games like Journey, The Last of Us Part II, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Step into the shoes of real-life video game creators for frontline accounts on the rigors of the game dev process. And so much more! Pay what you want for 26 books on this fascinating field, and support Girls Who Code with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Game Programming - Taylor Francis Book Bundle - Full spectrum game dev library. Ready to immerse yourself in the wide assortment of skills that make up the vocation of game development? This bundle of books from Taylor & Francis has you covered. Learn the nuts and bolts of game building with The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming. Get schooled on level design with 3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds. Understand what it takes to invest players in your universe with Once Upon a Pixel: Storytelling and Worldbuilding in Video Games. And more! Pay what you want for a vast library on this multifaceted craft and help support the Hidden Genius Project with your purchase.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

50% off NatureManufacture - Publisher Sale - Nature Manufacture have been providing developers with award-winning, game-ready assets through the Unity Asset Store for over 10 years. From volcanoes and rivers, to mountains, and beyond, fulfill all your nature needs here. PLUS, get Ice World for FREE with code NATUREMANUFACTURE2024
Unity Affiliate

Spotlight

MAXIMA: Keepers of the 2nd Law - Duel supernatural bosses in this surreal, sci-fi third-person shooter. Unlock game-changing abilities and a new challenging foe with every mission completion. Embrace the chaos of the ever-changing arenas, and experience a relentless battle against the unknown.

[You can get the demo on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Macalpine Ventures Ltd

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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