Game Dev Digest Issue #82 - How-To Tutorials

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some great stuff this week on some of the aspects of your game that perhaps doesn't get enough attention. Hope you enjoy.

Lessons Learned From Teaching Game Design - I’ve spent the past six months teaching game design at the Cologne Game Lab, a German university dedicated to the study of digital games. In this blog post, I want to share what I’ve learned during the process and condense it down into five practical rules you can apply to improve your own teaching.
Lars Kalthoff

How we did the tutorial system in Academia: School Simulator, Part 1: SSM - Academia’s tutorial is a linear guided tutorial with step by step progression. By making it linear with step by step progression, it’s easier to turn it into a reusable framework.
Coffee Brain Games

Unity Keyboard Shortcuts for Faster Game Development - Keyboard shortcuts offer quick access to often used tools and features within an application. Getting to know Unity’s keyboard shortcuts will lead to faster game development. Memorizing just a few of these will have you zooming through the Unity editor with such ease and fluidity some might say “you’re a wizard Harry”.
monkeykidgc.com

GUI vs GUILayout vs EditorGUI vs EditorGUILayout and When to Use Them – Unity - The Unity GUI API classes are fairly similar, so it’s worth clarifying their use cases.
Tangled Reality Studios

Texture optimization in Unity 2021.1 - A key focus area for Unity 2021.1, now available in beta, is Editor performance, helping you iterate faster on your project. Texture import and compression optimization is a key part of this.
Unity

Making an Abandoned German Cafe in Unity - Fabian Denter discussed the production of his latest 3D environment Abandoned German Cafe based on a real location in his hometown.
80.lv

Minnaert For People Who Don't Know How To Minnaert - Heya folks! Last time we learned about how to make specular reflections on dark skin look good. In this lesson we're going to take that even farther by learning about a new lighting model that can enhance the way skin, fabric, and other surfaces that are kinda shiny but not actually glossy look. Specifically, we're going to learn how to apply the Minnaert lighting model.
Team Dogpit

Custom shaders with depth sampling - While making silo27 I had to make a custom shader for some glowing “electrical” water. I had to make some research on how to achieve it, with the depth fades and shoreline effect, how depth pass texture sampling works, so here is a rundown on how the final shader works.
edraflame.com

How to create a 3d platformer in Unity (Episode 4: Working with Cinemachine) - Now that we have a player character that is able to move and jump, we’re going to have to work on the game camera because.
ZAYD CARELSE

How To Make A Custom Mouse Cursor - -
This is a quick guide on how to make a 2D, custom mouse cursor in Unity. There is some Unity documentation on it, which I found partially helpful, but some of the functions didn’t work as expected, so I’m going to share how I got around it.
stuartspixelgames.com

How to create a camera shake effect in Unity - To create a compelling story, different mechanisms are used, one of them is the camera shake effect, used to portray some kind of violence like a bomb going off or you being shot at.
konaduakwasiakuoko.medium.com

How to Create a Press Kit for Your Mobile Game (and Why You Really Should) - A press kit makes it easy for journalists and reviewers to write about your game. Here’s how to put a press kit together and how to use it.
gameanalytics.com

Unity Releases - Unity 2021.1.0 Beta 7 and Unity 2021.2.0 Alpha 5 have been released.
Unity

Videos

Coding Adventure: Chess AI - My attempt at creating a little chess playing program!
Sebastian Lague

So I Learned To Make PS1 Graphics In Less Than 24 Hours - Retro graphics are coming back in a big way, and it's surprisingly easy to do.
Garbaj

Creating procedural walk movement | Prototype Series - In this episode of the Prototype Series, we've expanded the Procedural Boss project by creating a procedurally animated walk animation!
Unity

Wall Cutout in Unity Shader Graph [Tutorial] - Many games need to make sure the focus is on the player or some other object, and walls are usually a hindrance. You could move the camera past the wall or render things over it.
Daniel Ilett

How I Shipped My Game On Switch With 196 Unity Scenes - How do you organize a full project with over 100+ Unity Scenes?
Thousand Ant

Master your Unity UI Grid! - Grid Layout Group tutorial - This tutorial/guide will show you how to create great buttons in Unity UI (GUI) system!
Coco Code

Particles in Unity 3D - A quick overview of the Unity particle system. We go from top to bottom covering everything form emitters to noise variance. The Unity particle system is extremely powerful and versatile! This video acts as a great guide for beginners and a nice refresher for pros!
Christopher Tharp

Importing Excel spreadsheets into Unity, using CSV format to read, easy tutorial - Importing Excel spreadsheets into Unity, using CSV format to read, easy tutorial
Destined To Learn

Assets

Lunar New Year Mega Bundles - The Unity Asset Store is currently running an exciting Lunar = New Year Mega Bundle sale! Users can save up to 96% with these curated bundles of top quality assets= , which will include tools and art through February 26.

$9.99 Bundle - save up to 90%
This bundle contains PBR Material Bundle Vol1 (445), Roslyn C# - Runtime Compiler, and Loading Screen.

$19.99 Bundle - Save up to 95%
This bundle contains everything from the $9.99 bundle, plus Asset Cleaner PRO - Clean | Find References, POLYGON - Knights Pack, Shader Weaver, Bio IK, Top Down - Fantasy Forest, and Japanese Alley.

$29.99 Bundle - Save up to 96%
This bundle contains everything from the $9.99 and $19.99 bundles, plus UI Particle System, uRPG - Singleplayer RPG, Everyday Motion Pack, Little Heroes Mega Pack, Polyverse Skies • Low poly skybox shaders and textures, Paint Craft (Drawing & Coloring book engine), Low Poly Vegetation Pack, GUI PRO Kit - Casual Game, Cartoon FX Remaster, Puppet2D, and Oak Forest Environment.
Unity Affiliate

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: FRESH START GAME DEV ASSETS BUNDLE - Give your game development career a fresh start with these amazing asset packs from the creators over at Game Asset Bundle (GAB). Our latest bundle includes top assets like the Cyber City Exterior Tileset, Cyber City Music Pack, Isometric Dungeon Designer, Rural Japan Asset Pack, Medieval High Seas, and many more! Plus your purchase will support JDRF, a leading global organization funding type 1 diabetes (T1D) research.
$758 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF PAY
$1 OR MORE
Humble Bundle Affiliate

GDX - Game Development Extensions, a battle-tested library of game-ready high-performance C# code. [check out the feature list]
dotBunny Open Source

Unity-QuickSheet - Unity-QuickSheet enables you to use google and excel spreadsheet data within Unity editor. With Unity-QuickSheet, you can retrieve data from a spreadsheet and save it as an asset file with a ScriptableObject format even without writing single line of code.
kimsama Open Source

HierarchyHighlighter - Free Hierarchy Highlighter Script for easy identification of different Game Objects in the Unity Editor. [watch the tutorial video]
2irate2migrate Open Source

Pattern Generator - Use this tool to create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns.
doodad.dev

HapticFeedback - Perform haptic feedback on both iOS and Android devices.
CandyCoded Open Source

Bogus for .NET: C#, F#, and VB.NET - Hello. I'm your host Brian Chavez (twitter). Bogus is a simple and sane fake data generator for .NET languages like C#, F# and VB.NET. Bogus is fundamentally a C# port of faker.js and inspired by FluentValidation's syntax sugar. Bogus will help you load databases, UI and apps with fake data for your testing needs.
bchavez Open Source

Addressables for the Busy Developer - For Game Developers Who Are Sick of Working Hard to Release Games That Get Negative Reviews. Learn Unity Addressables in a Single Weekend and End the Misery of Poor Reviews and Refunds from Nasty Performance Issues
The Gamedev Guru

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: BIG MUSIC 2 - We’re bringing a serious set of royalty-free musical magic in our newest bundle for game developers, film and content creators! Get music packs like Fantasy Adventure Orchestral Loops Pack, Electronic Industrial Music Pack, and Space Music Themes - Puzzle & Casual Games. Plus, your purchase helps support the Prevent Cancer Foundation & Save the Children!
$295 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF
PAY $1 OR MORE
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

The Eraser - The Eraser is a survival horror adventure designed in the footsteps of the classic Silent Hill and Resident Evil games, mixing their formula with brutal skill-based combat inspired by Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

The Eraser uses an isometric view combined with side-scrolling sections.
pbg.itch.io

You can subscribe to the free weekly newsletter on GameDevDigest.com

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.