Game Dev Digest — Issue #201 - Multiplayer, Animation, and more

Issue #201 - Multiplayer, Animation, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Multiplayer guides and samples, animation breakdowns, AI, VFX and shaders, plus more. Enjoy!

How to create a Space Portal with HLSL in Unity - Discover the secrets of the universe and unleash your creativity with our tutorial on how to create an amazing space portal in Unity using HLSL! Immerse yourself in a captivating cosmic journey as you delve into the mysteries of shader programming and build a portal that will transport you to remote and unknown places. Dare to explore the depths of outer space and master the power of High-Level Shading Language to bring stunning visual effects to life.
jettelly.com

The Antagonists - In the 1980s, no one was quite sure what computer games might become. Were they a first step toward interactive movies? Digital versions of tabletop roleplaying games? For a while, the publishing industry was quite keen to turn them into interactive books, and a "bookware" boom featured text adventure adaptations of popular novels from authors like Anne McCaffrey and Stephen King.
50 Years of Text Games

Unity 2023.3 coming April 2024 with updates for graphics and performance - We’re adding a third Tech Stream to our Unity 2023 release lifecycle to include production-ready additions for graphics, performance, and productivity.
Unity

How creators launch and scale multiplayer games with Unity - Read how studios of all sizes, using any game engine, have scaled to match their game’s needs.
Unity

Custom SRP 2.0.0 - Switch to the Render Graph API. Use passes to partition work. Play nice with profiling.
catlikecoding.com

A simple example of using IEnableableComponent - IEnableableComponent is one of the new features of Unity’s Entities 1.0. When a component has this interface, it will have an enabled or disabled state. What this means is you can include this component in a query but disabled ones are ignored. Let’s get to the code!
coffeebraingames.wordpress.com

Videos

The Secret behind THAT Uncharted Animation - Dive into the heart of Uncharted's iconic procedural animation and unlock the secret to bringing that magic into your Unity projects. In this break down of Nathan Drake's environment interactions, we'll learn from the best AAA developers in the business and determine how we can recreate these animations ourselves. Whether you're an animation enthusiast, a growing game developer, or just an Uncharted fan, this deep dive is crafted just for you. …
iHeartGameDev

80s Synthwave Style GridShader in Unity 2022.3 URP ShaderGraph - A short tutorial how to create a 80s #synthwave style #grid shader and how to optimize it!
FireDragonGameStudio

How I recreated Valorant's Sovereign skin Finisher VFX using Unity Engine - Prepare to be spellbound as I unveil the meticulously recreated Sovereign skin Finisher VFX from Valorant, achieved through the sheer brilliance of Unity Engine's capabilities. Get ready for a visual spectacle!
MojoSoloDev

Creating a Hexagonal Map in Unity: Dive into Scriptable Objects, IEnumerator, Tasks & Multithreading - Dive into the latest episode of our'Create a Turn-Based Strategy with Unity' series, where we focus on creating a hexagonal map, diving deep into Scriptable Objects, and exploring the power of IEnumerator, Tasks, and asynchronous methods. This Unity tutorial is perfect for both beginners and seasoned developers aiming to enhance their game's terrain and optimize performance.
Soul's Game Dev Journey

Volumetrics: Introduction to ray marching tutorial | Unity - Let’s get our heads in the clouds! In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to construct a cloud in Unity in three stages.
Unity

Creating an FPS Controller in Unity (Movement, Footsteps, Jumping) - In this Unity tutorial we'll be creating a First Person Controller, which is always a great way to test out scenarios, games and scenes - You sometimes need something that can easily be dropped into your projects and used. We'll be writing this from scratch and will incorporate movement, inputs, sprinting, jumping, footsteps and sounds. We'll also randomize those so we never hear the same footstep.
SpeedTutor

The tutorial I needed 1.5 years ago - I remember VERY clearly how difficult I found Inheritance to understand when I was less experienced, and so I made the tutorial that I would have wanted to watch back then, which includes ACTUAL code examples for things you'd want to use in a game (instead of abstract/vague examples that just confused me more.) So, this Unity tutorial will REALLY help you better understand clean coding using inheritance and interfaces.
Sasquatch B Studios

Enemy State Machine AI FULL IMPLEMENTATION | AI Series 47 | Unity Tutorial - Learn how you can implement Enemy AI with a Finite State Machine. This is a full implementation using Unity Hierarchical State Machine (Unity HFSM), a code-driven state machine framework for Unity.
LlamAcademy

Making graphics LOOK GOOD - Indie game devlog #08 - In this devlog i want to show you how i make my unity solo game look way better than before. The low poly graphics might not fit completly and some props are also missing in the game, but i think it kinda looks decent.
JD Dev

Just Boids | Useless Game Dev - Boids are cool! I like seeing flocks of birds in video games, or schools of fishes swimming around. Join me in attempting to not thermal throttle my computer while putting as many "bird-oids" on screen!
Useless Game Dev

Narrative Moments on a Budget: Stretching Storytelling "Dollars" Across the Moments That Matter - How do studios tell great stories on a budget? When everything is important but time is limited, how can teams empower developers with the support they need to approach the complex decisions of where to invest the narrative bandwidth? This GDC 2023 talk provides a foundational framework of how to spend one's narrative "dollars" across the stories being developed.
GDC

Flopping Successfully: Running a Studio Without a Huge Hit - The stories we hear are often about the huge, mind-numbing successes. They are the one-in-a-million, lottery winning-type tales. Those success stories are great, and can inspire us to work hard and cross that finish line. However, they are few and far between, and aiming for that type of success can set you up to fail.
GDC

Add Dynamic Hair to Your Games in Unity using Dynamic Bones - In this tutorial I show you how to add dynamic hair to you game in Unity 3D. This same process can be used to also add other dynamic elements like bunny ears or dynamic car antenna and so on.
Vlad

Assets

Fantasy And Sci-Fi Essentials For Unity Bundle - Amazing sci-fi & fantasy assets for Unity.

Propel your Unity game project to new heights of visual fidelity with this massive sci-fi and fantasy asset bundle, crafted by some of the dev scene’s most esteemed content creation studios! You’ll get all the building blocks needed to craft impressive and immersive game worlds, including a vast catalog of sci-fi and fantasy creatures, high-end animation sets for all manner of entities monstrous to mundane, stunning environment packs, and much more. As a bonus, you’ll also get a voucher for the Unity Asset Store good for 10% off your next purchase!

Pay what you want for this enormous asset bundle valued at over $2,500, and help support Alzheimer's Research UK with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Best of the Dev Days of Summer Sale - Customers now have one more week of savings on bestsellers from the last several weeks. Top assets from the entire summer sale have been combined into one massive second chance opportunity to grab an awesome tool or art pack at 50% off.
Unity Affiliate

Modular To Do Lists - Offline Project Management Tool (FREE) - Modular Todo list for Unity is a free, powerful, easy-to-use tool that lets you create, manage, and organize your projects in Unity entirely offline. It is suitable for small tasks and powerful enough to manage the entire project.
Tiny Giant Studio Affiliate

VehicleNoiseSynthesizer - VNS is an open-source free audio addon primarily designed for Unity to simulate vehicle sounds based on engine rpm similar to a granulator without dependencies such as FMOD.
ATG-Simulator Open Source

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

unity-raytracing - GPU Raytracing renderer which runs in hlsl compute shader in unity. This project is implemented by pure hlsl vertex shader, fragment shader and compute shader in Unity, not using any raytracing shaders.
airliang Open Source

UnityMemorySnapshotThing - Tool to analyze unity memory snapshot files (.snapshot) outside of unity, and find leaked managed shells.
SamboyCoding *Open Source

RuntimeMeshSimplification - Welcome to the Runtime Mesh Simplification Repository! This project provides a collection of script samples that simplify meshes in real-time using multi-threading, enabling efficient rendering and performance improvements in applications with complex geometries, without sacrificing rendering frame rates.
simplestargame Open Source

Unity-AudioLoader - Async audio loader with two caching layers for Unity.
IvanMurzak Open Source

extDebug - extDebug are tools for easy development and testing of games on Unity.
Iam1337 Open Source

UnityMainThreadDispatcher - A thread-safe way of dispatching IEnumerator functions to the main thread in unity. Useful for calling UI functions and other actions that Unity limits to the main thread from different threads.
PimDeWitte Open Source

CoSharp - Lua style coroutines for C#, with Unity style waiting.
CoSharp is based closely on Lua's implementation for coroutines, with some of Unity's waiting functionality thrown in.
Enichan Open Source

LiteEntitySystem - Pure C# HighLevel API for multiplayer games using .NET Standard 2.1
RevenantX Open Source

HoneyAttributes - Unity plugin that adds some useful attributes. Most of them will work with any editor.
Biegus Open Source

Microscenes - Microscenes is a highly experimental visual scripting solution I developed to design small gameplay sections. Its main idea is to provide UX with minimum need for technical knowledge & fast iteration, without having to constantly update node database like Bolt forces you to. All graphs are stored in scene, not as scriptable objects so nodes can contain references to scene objects without any limitations. Though if you need to save graph to asset you can always use prefabs or presets.
SanielX Open Source

Unity-MecanimEventSystem - This is a highly practical, chain-programming style Animator event system that extends the functionality of the Animator through method extensions.
Bian-Sh Open Source

DialogueGraph - Dialogue Graph is an open-source editor tool for the Unity game engine used to create branching conversation trees in an easy and straightforward way by connecting nodes, and setting up conditions and triggers for the different conversation branches. An obvious use case for this tool is to create conversations with NPCs, although the versatility of this tool allows for any kind of project that requires branching behaviour based on checks and triggers.
TeodorVecerdi Open Source

gsmst-LetsSurf - A 3D movement/platforming game demo attempting to recreate CS:GO "bhopping" and "surfing" and Source Engine movement using elements from the Source Engine in Unity 3D.
Kevin-Kwan Open Source

Unity-Matchmaking - An example project utilizing lobby, relay and netcode
Matthew-J-Spencer Open Source

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

ShaderUtilsForSRP - Utilities for SRP shaders. Create HLSL and SRP Shader files easily using menu item.
stalomeow Open Source

OutlineFx - Simplified screen space outline for Unity Urp. Works with 2D and does not require to use special material. Has customization options such as: Edge softness, shape fill and mask with its animation
NullTale Open Source

Node_Editor_Framework - A flexible and modular Node Editor Framework for creating node based displays and editors in Unity
Seneral Open Source

UndoPro - UndoPro is a command-based undo system integrated into Unity's default system. This allows devs to use actions for their undo/redo operations without forcing the user into a new undo-workflow!
Seneral Open Source

UniversalInventorySystem - A Unity Package for creating easy to use and highly customizable inventories and inventory`s UI
Heymity Open Source

Simple-Inventory - 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

ConsoleLogSaver - The tool to share Unity console log with friend who is good at error resolving.
anatawa12 Open Source

rivet - Managed game servers, matchmaking, and DDoS mitigation that lets you focus on building your game.
rivet-gg Open Source

Apress Game Coding 2023 Book Bundle - Learn the functions of fun. Level up the technical skills you need to create games and lead a successful career in development with this bundle of ebooks from Apress! Deepen your understanding of digital audio, get a handle on 3D graphics, and learn the fundamentals of crafting game mechanics. Familiarize yourself with popular tools and platforms like GameMaker and MonoGame. Build a foundation for a wide range of game programming and development disciplines, and help support Direct Relief with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Cyber Streets Kitbash3D Flash Sale - Assets for your sci-fi dystopia. Populate the streets of your cyberpunk worlds with this bundle from KitBash3D! This Kit features kiosks, store fronts, food joints, interiors, machinery, street clutter, and more to craft your gritty futuristic environments—114 assets, 401 meshes, 35 PBR materials, and 375 textures all told. The Kit’s larger pieces also have detailed interiors suited for your sci-fi or dystopian worlds. Make the cyberpunk streets of your electric dreams, and help support Girls Who Code with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Game Dev Royalty Free Mega Music Bundle - Score your game project! Craft the soundtrack to your quests, the beats to your battles, and the perfect audio backdrop for your game world with this epic bundle of royalty-free music! This massive bundle features 50 music packs suited for a wide variety of game genres and styles, whether you’re creating an epic fantasy RPG, high-seas pirate adventure, hi-octane action game, or dark horror tale. Get hundreds of royalty-free tracks, and help support Cancer Research UK with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

X Invader - Become the master hacker 'X' and hack into the digital world. Utilize various weapons and hacking add-ons to create your own combat build. Wipe out the incoming enemies with exhilarating hack and slash action!

[You can get it in early access on Steam, and follow them on Twitter]
ALLAF GAMES

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