Game Dev Digest Issue #109 - Tools To Improve

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Short but hopefully sweet this week. I hope you can find some tools and tutorials here to help you in your own game. Enjoy!

Trails with no gaps for fast moving objects - This could be useful to read after the last tutorial: Using Particle Systems with ECS in Unity
edraflame.com

The Core Mechanics of Influence Mapping - In this tutorial, you'll learn about some of the motivation for influence maps and why they are so appealing. You'll also find out when to use influence maps, and what representation fits best with your game. Then, you'll see the algorithm in action as well as its most important parameters that you'll need to tune when using influence maps in your game.
gamedev.net

Boss Battle Design and Structure - Activision designer Mike Stout breaks down the boss battle into eight different beats, and runs two notable ones -- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Ganon and Portal's GladOS -- through a thorough analysis to illuminate their designs.
gamedeveloper.com

Unity Releases - Unity 2021.2.0 Beta 11 and Unity 2022.1.0 Alpha 7 have been released.
Unity

WildMeta - Keep your players engaged in your game with smarter NPCs Forget navmesh and pathfinding Our machine-learning based bots are designed and trained specifically for your game to play as a player or an NPC. They react naturally to their environment and players.
wildmeta.com

Videos

Unity VFX Graph - Electricity Tutorial (Procedural Shader) - Let's see how to create procedural Electricity with Unity Shader Graph and how to use it with VFX Graph to create Electric Orbs. It's a pretty quick technique that can be used with 3d objects and it doesn't require any drawing skills, only Unity.
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Bubble Shield - Unity Shader Graph Game VFX - A shield effect using Unity Shader Graph and a bit of c# code.
A Bit Of Game Dev

How to make Unity GLOW! (Unity Tutorial) - "How do I make Unity objects Glow? Why is my scene now glowing? Unity Bloom is not working!" I see these questions a lot so I figured I'd make a dedicated video I can refer back to whenever I see them again.
Code Monkey

Why video game doors are so hard to get right - There are many situations where it’s better to control emission of particles by distance travelled instead of time. This is particularly useful if the emitter’s speed varies a lot or it moves too fast so that even emitting every single frame will produce a trail with gaps.
Vox

Switching Action Maps in Unity's Input System - Switch the current input action map and enable/disable multiple action maps easily with Unity's Input System.
samyam

Root Motion Explained (Unity Tutorial) - In this Unity game development tutorial we're going to look at how we can move a character using Root Motion.
Ketra Games

Unity Creator Spotlight: Crying Suns by Alt Shift - Get a comprehensive look behind the scenes on Alt Shift’s hit tactical rogue-lite, Crying Suns. The team covers a wealth of topics as they walk us through the iterative process of building their UI, and explore the custom tools they developed to help deploy the title across multiple platforms.
Unity

Assets

Fantasy Games & Game Dev Software Bundle - Be your own hero. Get in on time-saving tools and other stellar art packs for your next Fantasy/ RPG project, all while contributing to green initiatives worldwide. Then, show off your sustainable superstar status by entering the Unity x Humble Bundle Showcase for a chance to have your game featured on play.unity.com and livestreamed on Twitch!

An incredible deal here, over $2,000 in assets for less than $30! These humble bundles have become automatic buys for me. Always a great value, I've wound up discovering great tools that I never knew I wanted.

Full of high quality models that go well together, perfect for kitbashing (callback to Tomas Sala's love for kitbashing in this week's Creator Spotlight: The Facloneer!).

Here are some of our favourite highlights:

There isn't enough room here to mention them all, so it's highly recommended you check the bundle out for yourself, below are the rest of the assets included:

Mesh Animation - Mesh Animation is a lightweight library for rendering hundreds of meshes in one draw call with GPU instancing. Mesh Animation bakes vertex positions for each frame of animation to texture. A Custom shader then moves mesh vertices to desired positions on the GPU. This allows drawing the same original mesh multiple times with GPU Instancing. Unique animation parameters are overridden for each instance with Material Property Block. NOTE: Library requires Odin Inspector [which you can get in the Humble Bundle above!] for custom editors.
codewriter-packages Open Source

AutoLOD (FREE) - AutoLOD is a very simple tool that will generate a LOD group with any 3D object from your scene. It will automatically compute simplified versions of your meshes using decimation.
Léo Chaumartin Affiliate

What is Master Server Toolkit? - This is an independent, free and at the same time powerful solution to many of the problems you face when developing online multiplayer games and applications.
aevien Open Source

Runtime Node Editor - Unity runtime node editor using with Unity UI.
Cem Ugur Karacam Open Source

Pickle - A better Object picking solution for Unity. Pickle is a collection of Editor scripts and Attributes that aim to replicate and extend the behaviour of the default UnityEngine.Object picker.
MPozek Open Source

Streaming Image Sequence - Streaming Image Sequence is a package for playing sequential image sequences in Unity Timeline easily without making Unity 2D Sprites.
unity3d-jp Open Source

RelationsInspector - This is a node based editor and viewer that can be connected to all kinds of data in your Unity project. Its main advantage is probably the automatic layout of nodes, allowing you to quickly grasp how they are connected. Support exists for asset references, asset dependencies, UI events, playmaker state machines and more, but you can also add your own.
seldomU Open Source

Cavern - Cavern is a fully adaptive object-based audio engine and upmixer without limitations for home, cinema, and stage use.
VoidXH Open Source

ShaderDebugger - Simple Unity framework to debug shader code. Supports vertex, fragment, standard, and postprocessing shaders.
arigo Open Source

ObservableCollections - ObservableCollections is a high performance observable collections(ObservableList, ObservableDictionary, ObservableHashSet, ObservableQueue, ObservableStack, ObservableRingBuffer, ObservableFixedSizeRingBuffer) with synchronized views.
Cysharp Open Source

Unity GUID Regenerator - A Unity editor tool to regenerate GUID for your assets
jeffjadulco Open Source

Synty Studios Sale - Synty Studios is a dedicated asset publisher that makes incredible, stylized art packs for game developers. With over 80 art packs with a wide variety of themes, Synty Studios' packs are great for beginners and experienced developers alike and are perfect for prototypes and game jams.

All assets from Synty Studios will be on sale for 50% off from September 1 through September 11. Additionally, there is a special offer coupon for three free assets using Coupon Code: SYNTY2021

ToggleFieldAttribute - Using this Unity attribute you can simply toggle an inspector field enable/disable based on other conditions.
emadkhezri Open Source

Spotlight

The Last Defense - The Last Defense is a 3D Tower Defense game ,where you play from the eyes of King Severin. Build and Update your defenses and try to push out the wave of corrupted creatures, that are invading trough multiple portals inside the kingdom. Help King Severin save his Kingdom from Doom.
[you can now wishlist it on&a