Game Dev Digest — Issue #147 - Give Your Game Some Personality

Issue #147 - Give Your Game Some Personality

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

A day early this week! No issue last week so hopefully this makes up for it. Enjoy!

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Triangle Grids - Grids are great for tactical gameplay of turn-based games because they allow discrete movement steps. That means that you can bind positioning to other resources such as movement points, action points, food, etc. Grids divide the infinite variety of movement options into a few specific ones, which can be considered separately by the player’s tactical mind. The most popular grid types are hexes and squares. But what about triangles? [Also the Hacker News discussion]
kvachev.com

Custom Navigation in Red Dust Part 1 - Modern games often have maps that are too big to handle with simple algorithms so in this article we discuss how these things were overcome in Red Dust.
lorinatzberger.com

How to tell if you have passed a waypoint? - It might first seem like it's easy to determine if you have passed a waypoint you are heading towards. Can't you just use the distance between you and the waypoint and if that distance is small, then change waypoint. This will work if your character has a small turning radius. But if that turning radius is large, I promise you that you will see the character turning around the waypoint and never reach it - it will just spin around in a circle. But there may be a better way.
habrador.com

How To: Rope Mechanic - Here's the process of our rope mechanic. Hoping it will help some devs out there.
Delight @Thunder_Raccoon

Particle-based loading spinner! - Particle-based loading spinner! Takes about a minute in realtime for great results.
Mirza Beig @TheMirzaBeig

Intro To Raymarching - Last time we learned about SDFs. Now we're going to learn a cool way to use them: raymarching! Raymarching is a neat technique that is really good for drawing 3D scenes. Like, I don't mean you have a 3D scene in Unity and you put shaders on the materials you use, I mean, the entire scene is inside the shader itself. This is really getting into the arcane shader arts.
Team Dogpit

Using Indirect Multipliers To Balance Lighting Costs And Results - Today’s Objective: Look into how the Indirect Multiplier option on lights can be used to improve and increase the effects of performance-balanced lighting.
vintay.medium.com

My take on shaders: Stylized water shader - This shader, on the other hand, produces a simpler, more stylized water effect and, while it includes techniques from the previous water shader, it also introduces some other elements that could potentially inspire you for other effects as well.
halisavakis.com

SerializeReference improvements in Unity 2021 LTS - In the latest LTS release, polymorphic serialization offers improved user collaboration and API access, plus more granular handling of missing types.
Unity

Making a mobile game with motion sensors in Unity - In this post, we’ll go over the basics of using motion sensors in a Unity application. This can be applied to any app, whether it’s a casual mobile game, AR or VR experience, or one that includes features relying on a sense of movement.
Marian Pekár

Build a live multiplayer game in Unity with Ably - Here at Ably one of our most recent additions has been to introduce beta support for Unity within our .NET SDK. This has been exciting for us: multiplayer functionalities are at the core of so many games these days, and we’re keen to better support and enable developers in creating these amazing experiences.
ably.com

Unity 2022.2.0 Alpha 18 - Unity versions 2022.2.0 Alpha 18 and 2022.2.0 Beta 1 have been released.
Unity

Videos

Unity | Interactive Snow Shader | Stylized Setup URP + Built-In - URP Post, and the Built-in Post
MinionsArt

Giving Personality to Procedural Animations using Math - It's been a while since the last video hasn't it? I've made quite a bit of progress since the last update, and since one of the things I worked on was some procedurally animated characters, I decided to make a video about the subject. In particular, this video highlights the entire process from initial motivation, to the technical design, technical analysis, and game design considerations.
t3ssel8r

Animate like a Programmer - As a programmer, using the Unity animator can feel like you're losing some control over your game. We can manage our animation transitions entirely from code... Animation will feel as natural as your player controller script.
Tarodev

CGM Summer '22 - How to Create a Slamming AoE - Gamedev CG Meetup Summer '22 (2022, June 16th). Paulina Miciulevičiūtė, VFX Artist at Golem House “How to create a slamming AoE”
LZKA_lt

Outlines - Devlog 2 | A Cozy Creature Collecting and Management Game - The second devlog about my yet to be named cozy creature collecting and management game. This one covers the initial implementation of screen space outlines.
Robin Seibold

How to Find and Engage a Great Artist: A Non-Artist Primer - In this 2018 GDC session, Chickadee Games' Adam deGrandis covers the basic how's, what's, and why's of finding and engaging an artist that can help your indie game shine.
GDC

CHARACTER TRAIL TUTORIAL in Unity - With this Unity tutorial now you can add a cool Trail to your Characters! Super useful for when trying to convey a speed boost or a quick character movement, like a dash. I am speed!!!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Substance For Unity is Kinda Awesome... - Substance 3D just released their all new Unity plugin and it's very very very good. You can use Substance 3D Designer ssbar files directly inside the Unity game engine, even if you don't own Susbtance Designer. We also look at where you can get some substance materials for free.
Gamefromscratch

Procedural Grass in 'Ghost of Tsushima' - In this 2021 Advanced Graphics Summit talk, graphics programmer Eric Wohllaib will discuss how they generate acres of grass within reasonable memory and performance limits, techniques for rendering and animating individual blades, and methods for making thousands of individual blades of grass look like a natural field.
GDC

C# Coding Conventions in Unity - Follow these C# Coding Conventions when learning to program in Unity so that your code is easier to read and understand!
iHeartGameDev

Fixing Unity with C# Extension Methods - Learn how you can use C# extension methods to add your own methods to existing Unity classes.
James Makes Games

How to use Context Steering Game AI in Unity - P1 Overview - Creating a Game AI that makes an Enemy move naturally can be tricky. In this video we will implement Context Steering Behaviors in Unity for Chasing the player while Avoiding Obstacles to make our Enemy appear smart. [Part 2]
Sunny Valley Studio

Jobs System Line of Sight Checking | AI Series Part 40 | Unity Tutorial - Learn how you can implement the jobs system to improve the performance of Line of Sight checking for your AI!
LlamAcademy

UI & Background BLUR in Unity URP (FREE 2022 Tutorial) - We'll look at setting up and using a blur effect in Unity URP, this shader has a set of materials and has a render method to achieve the blur. You can set the strength and we'll look at making 3D objects render in-front of the URP blur.
SpeedTutor

VR Sound Design in Unity - Sound is an essential part of any game and VR is no exception to the rule. So in this video we wil have a look at how to create immersive sound in Unity.
Valem Tutorials

Assets

Blink Mega Bundles - $30 Bundle - save up to 23%
This bundle contains: Stylized Rocks, Unique AoE Magic Abilities Volume 1, and Magic Sci-Fi Sword Sounds.

$35 Bundle - save up to 84%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 bundle, plus VFantasy Portal FX, iStep, and Korea Goryeo Village.

$40 Bundle - save up to 94%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 and $35 bundle, plus Low Poly Terrain - Polaris 2020, Open World Nature Kit, Path Painter™ II, RPG & Dungeon Sounds, Fullscreen Editor, Unique Projectiles Volume 1, Auto Fence & Wall Builder, Irval the Wyvern, UMA for RPG Builder, and FPS Medieval Weapons - Ultimate Pack.

Additionally, all assets by Blink are on sale for 50% off. This passionate team is dedicated to Unity tool development and art assets, and won both the 2021 Asset Store Publisher of the Year and the 2021 Asset Store Best Development Tool awards.
Unity Affiliate

Stylised Character Controller - A stylised physics based character controller made in Unity 3D.
joebinns Open Source

Unity Visual Effect Graph Builtin - This repo is a fork of Unity's VFX Graph v10.3.2, back porting features from the later versions of the VFX Graph.
The only reason for this is because the VFX Graph does not officially support the built-in pipeline, and v10.4.0+ removed support for the builtin pipeline all together.
As we have some built-in pipeline projects that make use of the VFX Graph, it is useful to keep this around locked to this version.
LastAbyss Open Source

Silent's Cel Shading Shaders - Shaders for Unity for cel shading, designed to take Unity's lighting into account while also presenting materials in the best possible way. Featuring lots of features with good performance!
s-ilent Open Source

Outlines - A custom renderer feature for screen space outlines based on Erik Roystan Ross Outline Shader.
Robinseibold Open Source

InspectorTween - Tween system for unity mostly for setup in inspector instead of code.
RadialGames Open Source

Sub Asset Editor - An editor tool for SubAsset in your project. 'SubAsset' is an asset that is stored in the same file as the main asset.
mob-sakai Open Source

PrefsGUI - Accessors and GUIs for persistent preference values using a JSON file.
fuqunaga Open Source

UnityExtensions - C# extension functions, attributes and editor tools for common Unity problems. Additional Linq-like IEnumerable extensions. Expandable attribute, to in-place edit asset references. HDRP URP Asset converter. Project file fixer, to set C# version and warning level for .csproj files.
Faulo Open Source

Simple-Inventory (with simple Factorio-Like crafting and mining) - Includes an Inventory, Pickups, Crafting, and Mining as well as a camera and unit controller, and an object spawner for creating environmental objects.
KampinKarl1 Open Source

Castle of Illusion Inspired 16-bit Environment Free Assets Pack. - Hello World, One of my favorite games as a child was "Castle of Illusion Starring MM" I played this game for days and stayed there just for the Atmosphere and the artwork. Hope you enjoy these assets feel free to use them on your own projects.
Ansimuz

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

AnimMap Baker For Animated Characters - Using GPU to implement large-amount animation characters rendering. The animation map for vertex shader to modify the vertex position of the mesh at runtime. Useing GPU instancing to reduce draw calls.
chenjd Open Source

GPU Spline Deformation - Baking spline deformation to a texture then applying it to a mesh via a shader.
RoyTheunissen Open Source

GPUGraph - An open-source Unity plugin for generating coherent noise on the GPU, for both editor and runtime uses. The source is available here, on Github. It is also available on the Asset Store, but that version is currently out of date.
heyx3 Open Source

Unity Grass Instancer - Unity C# script and shader for GPU instanced grass.
MangoButtermilch Open Source

Loxodon Framework - An MVVM & Databinding framework that can use C# and Lua to develop games.
vovgou Open Source

Unity Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics - SPH in the Unity engine implemented in three different ways using MonoBehaviour, Entity-Component-System, and ComputeShader.
Gornhoth Open Source

DOTSAnimation - A High Level Animation Framework and State Machine for DOTS - DOTSAnimation is a (opnionated) general purpose Animation State Machine framework for DOTS, built on top of Kinemation.
gamedev-pro Open Source

Behaviac - behaviac is a framework of the game AI development, and it also can be used as a rapid game prototype design tool. behaviac supports the behavior tree, finite state machine and hierarchical task network(BT, FSM, HTN)
Tencent Open Source

Scriptable Events - Minimalistic and extensible event system implemented via ScriptableObject, inspired by Unite2017.
chark Open Source

Developer Console - Developer Console for Unity with easy integration to existing projects.
anarkila Open Source

Spotlight

Shoot To Kill - SHOOT TO KILL is a single player retro-FPS inspired by the violence and pace of shooters of the past. Take on hordes of soldiers and experiments created by an authoritarian military group in the dystopian future of 2140.

[Wishlist on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Demo Disk Productions

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