Game Dev Digest — Issue #110 - Give your game a makeover

Issue #110 - Give your game a makeover

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Check out the great stuff on AI, traversal, promoting your game, and a bunch of great assets. Enjoy!

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Enemy AI in Unity Games with ML-Agents Toolkit - Enemy AI is an important element of games as it breathes life into our adversaries. Who would want to fight an enemy that stands in one place while bumping into a wall every second rather than focus at attacking us? Needless to say that would ruin the experience in an instant and put players off. In this article we are going to go through a technique that will make our non-playable characters (NPCs) “aware” of their surroundings. They will make decisions on the gained knowledge in a 2D platformer thanks to the ML-Agents toolkit.
pavcreations.com

The Scriptable Object Asset Registry Pattern - This article describes a pattern to serialize prefabs or any complex data. Doing so allows us to store data to disk or send it over a network to either a game server or another game client. This article pairs well with the previous article on saving and loading data, so I recommend you read that one first if you haven’t already.
Bronson Zgeb

Extra Builder - Imagine you are in a game jam. You want to publish to as many platforms as possible so more people would have a chance to play your game. But getting a build and uploading to itch takes time. And if you have more than one you have to wait until a build completes, switch to the new target platform, start a new build.
Anton Semchenko

Productivity tips with Odin: A tool for making tools - With over 100 attributes to streamline workflow, Odin Inspector lets you enjoy the benefits of a powerful, customized, and user-friendly editor without writing any custom editor code. Meanwhile, the powerful and extensible Odin Serializer, alongside the Odin Validator, which scans your work for underlying issues, similarly serve to support your most ambitious endeavors.
Unity

Video Game Trailer Specifications - Each of the major video game platforms have different video specifications for trailers; if your trailer doesn't comply, you can waste valuable time re-submitting. The information on this page is a based on official branding guides, trailer submission guides, and trailers clients of mine have successfully submit.
derek-lieu.com

Unity 2021.2.0 Beta 12 - Unity 2021.2.0 Beta 12 and Unity 2022.1.0 Alpha 8 have been released.
unity3d.com

Videos

30 Minute Steam Page Makeovers - In this 2021 GDC session, marketing consultant Chris Zukowski gives some great tips to improve Steam pages for video games, showing Steam Store changes that will actually have an effect on your game.
GDC

Making enemy AI detect the player in Unity 2D - In this tutorial I will show you different ways to create AI sensors so that your enemy AI can detect the player. Scripts will be about Unity 2D but the same method can be applied to Unity 3D.
Sunny Valley Studio

Push Obstacles Using a Character Controller (Unity Tutorial) - In this Unity tutorial we're going to look at how we can push obstacles around using a Character Controller and Unity’s physics system.
Ketra Games

Fixing Gaps between Tiles in Unity 2D // Removing Unity Tilemap Gaps. (Unity 2D Tutorial) - If you've ever tried to work with Unity Tilemaps, you've probably seen those weird invisible lines between tiles. No worries, in this video I'll show you 3 ways to fix them! ;)
Khud0 - Indie Game Dev

Exterior Lighting in HDRP | Unity 2021.2 (Updated Workflow) - Learn how to light an exterior scene in Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
UGuruz

Unity Arrays? Don't Do this! - An argument for using TextAssets for storing your data.
Jason Storey

How to add subtitles to your game [Unity Tutorial] - Ever wanted to add better accessibility options to your game? Want to add some subtitles but don't know where to start? Don't worry, we'll have you up and running in no time using this super simple system using scriptable objects!
Comp-3 Interactive

Assets

Unity FPS Games & Game Dev Assets Software Bundle - Call the shots. Humble Bundle and Unity have joined forces to bring you top-notch tools and art packs for your next FPS project. Take advantage of massive savings on great assets, all while contributing to sustainable initiatives worldwide. Then, enter the Unity x Humble Bundle Showcase for a chance to share your creation on play.unity.com and have it livestreamed on Twitch!

Another amazing Unity asset bundle deal from Humble Bundle, which as we said about the Fantasy assets bundle last week, are automatic buys for us. The deal is too great to pass up. Over $1,100 woth for less than $30. Assets you may want and new ones to discover you never knew you wanted.

This time centered around FPS games, here are some of our favourites:

• SCI FI CHARACTERS MEGA PACK VOL 2 - They're beautiful!
• UFPS: Ultimate FPS - Get a jump start on your own FPS game, it's all here.
• Polarith AI Pro | Movement with 3D Sensors - AI is already hard enough, save time and effort with this one!

There is so much packed into this bundle, here is the rest of the list:

• RV Honor Ai
• RV Smart Ai
• Sensor Toolkit
• Super Multiplayer Shooter Template
• Character Movement Fundamentals
• JU TPS 2 : Third Person Shooter System + Vehicle Physics
• Animated Hands with Weapons Pack
• Sci-fi Weapons Arsenal
• Desert Environment - Town & Palace | CITADEL
• Post Apocalyptic World Pack
• 3D Scifi Kit Vol 3
• CScape City System
• Shooting Range Interiors
• Footstep and Foley Sounds
• Gun & Explosion Sounds
• Sci-Fi Gun Sounds
• Colossal Game Music Collection
• Highlight Plus
• ProTips - Tooltip System
• Impact - Physics Interaction System
• GUI PRO Kit - Fantasy RPG Not to mention 2 Steam games to download: Tannenberg and Verdun Humble Bundle Affiliate

Asset Store Sale - [If the Humble Bundle isn't enough for you, even more assets are on sale on the Asset Store!]
Amazing new assets are added every day to the Unity Asset Store, but sometimes these new assets can be hard to find. To help users discover these fresh assets, we're putting them on sale! From September 14 through October 1, 2021 more than 150 new assets will be available for 50% off.
Unity Affiliate

MultiTag System for Unity - This package allows you to Tag Game Objects with ScriptableObjects. Allows you to put as many Tags on your GameObject as you want. Add and remove tags via code and inspector. Work with ScriptableObjects instead of strings. Faster than Unity's tag system.
IntoTheDev Open Source

Traverser 2.0 - Traverser is a free and open source player traversal toolkit featuring Locomotion, Parkour and Climbing. Includes procedural animation, physical animation, custom motion warping and root motion. It is self-contained in a set of scripts. Use the given abilities or expand the system through its shared ability workflow.
AitorSimona Open Source

UnitySteer 3.1 - UnitySteer is a toolkit to help build steering behaviors for autonomous agents in Unity.
ricardojmendez Open Source

Unity AsyncRoutines - A "spiritual successor" to Unity Routines, AsyncRoutines is a replacement for Unity's coroutines that makes use of C# 7's async functions (available in Unity 2018.3).
tomblind Open Source

MeshDebugger v0.8 - MeshDebugger is an editor tool to visually inspect a mesh. Very helpful if you want to debug your procedurally generated mesh or inspecting ideal parts of your model.
willnode Open Source

Deform - A fully-featured deformer system for Unity.
Keenan Woodall Open Source

Vector Shapes for Unity - VectorShapes is a simple and easy to use library for drawing vector shapes in Unity.
anyuser Open Source

SplineMesh - A Unity plugin to create curved content in real-time with bézier curves.
benoit-dumas Open Source

NativeQuadtree - A Quadtree Native Collection for Unity DOTS.
marijnz Open Source

Config Assets - Simple & Lightweight solution for managing configuration assets in Unity projects.
caneva20 Open Source

Signals - Lightweight type-safe messaging system. Very fast in terms of performance. Allows you to get last dispatched signal.
IntoTheDev Open Source

Unity Assets Advanced Editor - Unity .assets and AssetBundle editor.
Igor55x Open Source

ProtoPromise - ProtoPromise took inspiration from ES6 Promises (javascript), RSG Promises (C#), uPromise (C#/Unity), and TPL and improved upon their short-comings.
This library conforms to the Promises/A+ Spec as far as is possible with C# (using static typing instead of dynamic), and further extends it to support Cancelations and Progress. It also is fully interoperable with C#'s Tasks and Unity's Coroutines.
timcassell Open Source

SUSMachine - a Simple Unity State Machine - A state machine implementation with a quick, easy and nice to use API - no reflection or string names, no need to make a million subclasses.
JamesYFC Open Source

Scriptable Object Variant for Unity (Scriptable Object Data Overrider) - Adds a field to any scriptable object tagged with the [SOVariant] attribute that lets you select an original SO (parent) and override selected fields in the child object. When changing values in the original, values are automagically propagated to the children.
GieziJo Open Source

Editor Rich Presence - Show off what you're working on in unity with Editor Rich Presence on discord.
MarshMello0 Open Source

URP Toon Shader - A Toon Shader in Unity Universal Render Pipeline.
ChiliMilk Open Source

Spotlight

Pixel Cup Soccer - Ultimate Edition - Pixel Cup Soccer is a casual retro style soccer game, a great evolution from the previous edition. It's dynamic, arcade, with a fast paced gameplay, just the fun part of soccer! The game has great pixel art graphics like the games from the 90’s, evoking nostalgia.
BATOVI Games Studio

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