Game Dev Digest — Issue #117 - Improving Visuals and Using Real-World Data

Issue #117 - Improving Visuals and Using Real-World Data

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Get great looking visuals a variety of ways in this issue. Enjoy!

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Expert tips on optimizing your game graphics for consoles - Get pointers on how to reduce batch count, what shaders to avoid, rendering options, and more.
Unity

Console game discovery: 4 big trends in 2021 - This time, we’re following up last Monday’s look at big PC game discovery trends in 2021 by focusing on the console side of things. It’s a large, complex subject that we can’t possible summarize in four multi-paragraph sections. But we’re going to do it anyhow. We laugh in the face of mortal danger.
Simon Carless

Don’t miss the Prefab optimizations in Unity 2020 LTS - The 2020 LTS is made for creators like you who prioritize greater stability and support when teamwork is underway. In this release, we've made several optimizations to speed up workflows specifically for the designers out there. These include new capabilities for editing Prefabs in the context of your scene, optimizations to Nested Prefabs, and Quality of Life changes.
Unity

Shadow outlines tutorial - In this tutorial I will show you how to sample the shadow map of the main light, make a Lambert based toon lighting model and draw outlines around the shadows.
Kelvin van Hoorn

Improving Game Visuals with Unity’s HDRP - Improve your game visuals and take them up by several notches using the High Definition Render Pipeline from Unity.
raywenderlich.com

What’s new for artists and designers in Unity 2021.2 - The new Unity 2021.2 Tech Stream release is now available. As part of this release, we’ve included a number of new features and improvements dedicated to helping artists and designers optimize creative workflows and create powerful immersive experiences.
Unity

The "KISS" Dependency Injection in Unity - Two questions for you: 1) Are you using a dependency injection system in Unity? 2) If so, can you understand, read, debug and maintain the code of your dependency injection system in less than 10 minutes? If the answer to any is NO, this post might help :-)
The Gamedev Guru

Six Truths About Video Game Stories - Our tiny company has been earning (well, "earning") a good living making indie computer games for 27 years now. This is an extremely tough, competitive business, and we've been workin' it for a longer continuous period than just about everyone.
bottomfeeder.substack.com

Developing an Overlay Shader for Unity (Part 1) - I recently wrote an overlay effect to highlight units through walls, using the following criteria: Ability to see through walls, support alpha blending, a thin, crisp outline, and grouping (multiple objects share the same outline if they touch). [Part 2 is here]
hyunkell.com

#unitytips Dev Takeover: VFX and shaders with Harry Alisavakis - The Unity team invites super users from our community to share their insights, tips, and tricks directly with our followers. We’re kicking things off with Harry Alisavakis, tech artist at Jumpship Studio and VFX wizard extraordinaire.
Unity

Videos

I Tried Creating a Game Using Real-world Geographic Data - A little experimental game I've been working on recently, where you fly around a tiny version of the world and deliver packages to various cities. Would love to hear any ideas you might have about how this could be taken further!
[You might also be interested in Unity 2019 - Adding Real World Height Maps To Your Game]
Sebastian Lague

Unity VFX Graph - Fire Tornado Effect Tutorial - In this Unity tutorial we are going to create a Fire Tornado! You will learn how to model the Tornado Mesh in Blender, how to create the Tornado Shader in Shader Graph and how to use it all in Visual Effect Graph.
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Recreate the PS1's Weird Affine Texture Mapping with Unity Shaders - The PlayStation 1 was many people's first console, but games on the system were plagued by strange graphical artefacts. One of these is called affine texture warping, which causes wall and floor textures to appear wobbly. In this tutorial, we'll look at how the modern graphics pipeline avoids this effect, then remove those features to get our own wobbly Unity games!
Daniel Ilett

The RIGHT way to Pool in Unity - Save your Game Performance with the new generic Object Pool - Pooling made easy with Unity's new generic ObjectPool classes. Learn why you need it and how to implement it with as little as 2 lines of code.
Jason Weimann

Shader Graph in Built in pipeline. Unity 2021.2 - I go over some of the updates that came from Unity 2021.2 In particular the ability to use Shader Graph in the Built in pipeline
PabloMakes

I Made Squid Game, But it's a Multiplayer Game - haha squid game go brrrr
Dani

Unity: Melt and Goo'ify your stuff with Amplify and Shadergraph - Happy Halloween! Huh? November? Oh, well. Anyway, in this tutorial we're melting our objects with both Amplify and Shadergraph (tutorial uses Amplify, Shadergraph available to download), and trying to get them to be a bit blobby as well. Am I running out of ideas? No! Just time, unfortunately.
PolyToots

Why Animation Curves In Unity Are So Useful - Animation Curves are more useful than you think! Let's take a look at some non-traditional ways we can take advantage of evaluating values in Animation Curves.
Game Dev Guide

Assets

Publisher Sale: Top Tools - All individual assets from 3 Tool Publishers, Pixel Crushers, Digital Ruby (Jeff Johnson), and Davit Naskidashvili, will be on sale at 50% off. Additionally, two bundles from Davit Naskidashvili, Amazing Shaders Bundle and Amazing Tools Bundle, will be 30% off. This sale continues through November 8.

Free Asset Promotion: Love/Hate, Fingers, and Resize Pro are free with the code TOOLBOX.
Unity Affiliate

Interactive Small Basic (ISB) - Interactive Small Basic (ISB) - Simple scripting language to be embedded in Unity games or shell environments.
wixette Open Source

Unity-Bullet-Hell - An extremely efficient projectile and particle generator for Unity.
This system makes use of Unity's Graphics.DrawMeshInstancedIndirect functionality, resulting in a single draw call per Projectile Type.
jongallant Open Source

Unlock the secrets of game design - Interested in game design from a narrative or user experience point of view? Taylor & Francis are here to take your understanding of games further with Independent Animation: Developing, Producing and Distributing Your Animated Films, 20 Essential Games to Study, Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games, and Basics of Game Design.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Kickstart your game development career with GameDev.tv. - Get awesome courses like the Complete Unity Developer 3D, Unity Mobile C# Developer, Unity Multiplayer and Complete Unity Developer 2D, plus art assets and audio to really make your games come alive. Your purchase will support Women Who Code, too!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

UniMob.UI - A declarative library for building reactive user interface.
codewriter-packages Open Source

Extra Controllers - This is a package that adds support for the following controllers via Unity's Input System.
popcron Open Source

Trimmer - An editor, build and player configuration framework for the Unity game engine.
sttz Open Source

Knn - Simple K-Nearest Neighbour library for Unity, using the 'Dots' technology stack (the Burst compiler and Unity's job system). It uses K-D trees to speed up queries.
ArthurBrussee Open Source

Minimal Compute Shader Examples - Minimal test scenes contains compute shaders, compute buffers etc Playing with the transport between CPU GPU.
cinight Open Source

Skinned-Mesh-Armature-Remapper - A Unity Editor utility that can transfer skinned mesh renderers from one armature to another.
CascadianWorks Open Source

Spotlight

Morbin Metal - Morbid Metal, a 3rd person, dark sci-fi, action roguelite, where players can shapeshift unique characters to slaughter enemies with powerful combos. [You can follow development on their Reddit, Youtube, and Twitter

Felix Schade
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