Game Dev Digest Issue #114 - Lessons Learned

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com 

Hope you enjoy a wide range of lessons learned from developers over the years.

Just one more turn - Game Development tips and tricks from the creator of Civilization, Sid Meier. - In Sid Meier's Memoir, Sid shares funny and interesting anecdotes that make it a real pleasure to read. There are also a lot of Game Development tips and lessons throughout the book. I'm gonna make sure you can get them all in this article.
gamedeveloper.com

20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer - My experiences over the last 20 years have shaped how I view software, and have led me to some beliefs which I’ve tried to whittle down to a manageable list that I hope you find valuable.
simplethread.com

Unity Shader Graph Procedural Planet Water Tutorial - In this tutorial we will create a nice stylised procedural water shader that will be ideal to use together with the procedural planets shader created in the Unity Shader Graph Procedural Planet Tutorial. We will create this water shader using Unity’s easy to use node-based shader creation tool Shader Graph.
timcoster.com

Custom Lighting in Shader Graph Part 2 - In this article, we’ll continue to improve the workflow of the previous article, in which we created a process for converting Shader Graphs to a custom lighting function. The last article ended with a manual workflow, so we’ll fully automate the process in this post. Along the way, we’ll learn about Asset Postprocessors, Reflection and Scriptable Singletons.
Bronson Zgeb

Accelerate Success Series: Unity UI Makeover Follow Up Q&A - Andrea, Sebastian, and some members of the Accelerate Solutions games team are returning to answer the ten of the best-unanswered questions from the Accelerate Success: The Unity UI makeover webinar.
Unity

How to optimize game performance with Camera usage: Part 2 - Welcome back to Part 2 of: How to optimize your game performance with Camera usage.
Unity

Unity Draw Call Batching: The Ultimate Guide [2021] - Draw calls are never a problem. That is, until you add one more element and suddenly your render thread becomes your new bottleneck. Can you guess why keeping Unity draw calls at bay is today more relevant than ever?
The Gamedev Guru

Using the Terrain Tools in Unity - Learn to create and manage a wide range of terrains in your apps by using Unity’s powerful Terrain Tools and the all new Terrain Toolbox API.
raywenderlich.com

How To Use 2D Sprites With a Particle Emitter – Unity - This article teaches you how to use Sprites or other custom 2D images with the particle emitter in Unity.
stuartspixelgames.com

Burning Sphere VFX Breakdown - Wow 2k likes for my burning sphere, thanks a lot ! As requested by a lot of you here's a little breakdown.
Matt Ostertag @matt_ostertag

Differences between Hashtable vs Dictonary vs ConcurrentDictionary vs ImmutableDictionary - .NET has 4 built-in dictionary/map types [and] there’s no guidance on when to use what, mostly individual documentation on each implementation.
hanselman.com

Everything That Every .NET Developer Needs To Know About Disposable Types - Properly Disposing Objects - In this article, you will learn about .NET Developer Needs to Know About Disposable Types.
c-sharpcorner.com

How streamers pick games: the SplatterCat interview - A recent newsletter dealt with a ‘high Y1 multiplier’ Steam game that had done well in part because a couple of videos from the notable ‘variety’ YouTuber SplatterCat
newsletter.gamediscover.co

Developers explain why 4 is the magic multiplayer number - Why don’t developers simply add more players? If some games can do it, why not all of them? It’s a seemingly simple question with surprisingly complex answers. Luckily, the developers behind some some very big multiplayer titles were able to share their thoughts.
polygon.com

Videos

How To Create Water Effects in Unity - Water Bending Tutorial - Water Attack VFX in Unity Engine. Tutorial was made using Shader Graph and C# scripts. It covers 3 water effects, Water Ball, Water Bend, and Water Tube.
A Bit Of Game Dev

The Coding Secrets hidden in "Sonic the Hedgehog" - I tear apart the original Sonic the Hedgehog game to expose the secrets of how it was coded.
Coding Secrets

Unity AI | How to use DrawDebugTools to visualize NavmeshAgent path - In this unity3d tutorial you will learn how to visualize NavmeshAgent path in the unity AI navigation system using Draw Debug Tools, in the scene view , game view, and the build.
GAMEDEVWORKS (Mourad Bakhali)

Wet Shader Graph tutorial for Unity - This tutorial shows how to make a wet shader in Shader Graph. It is based on a Siggraph talk by Naughty Dog about Uncharted 4 technical art.
PabloMakes

Assets

Unity Mega Bundle - Fill Your Toolbox - Up to 95% Off Tools!

Powerful tools make users more productive, saving valuable time and effort, so it's not a surprise that the tool category is one of the most popular categories on the Unity Asset Store. From October 13 through October 31, users can save up to 95% off three curated Mega Bundle sets of must-have tools.

$25 Bundle - save up to 80%
This bundle contains: EnhancedScroller, Better UI, and Vault Inventory.

$35 Bundle - save up to 88%
This bundle contains everything from the $25 bundle, plus Forever - Endless Runner Engine for Unity, Easy Decal, Terrain Grid System, and MonKey - Productivity Commands.

$45 Bundle - save up to 95%
This bundle contains everything from the $25 and $35 bundles, plus Dungeon Architect, Space Graphics Toolkit, Digger PRO, MudBun: Volumetric VFX and Modeling, Mesh Slicer, DinoFracture - A Dynamic Fracture Library, Motion Matching for Unity, Asset Hunter PRO, Performance Tools, SALSA LipSync Suite, and Realistic Eye Movements.
Unity Affiliate

SuperPosition - NonDestructive Object Editing - Save unlimited states of your game objects in a easy nondestructive workflow! From the highly acclaimed developer of Task Atlas, Editor Portals and Perfect F comes another amazing Editor tool!
Launch Discount! Get 50% off right now! Get Perfect F, Editor Portals For $5, or even Task Atlas for only $12.50 after purchasing SuperPosition.
ShrinkRay Entertainment Affiliate

Darkest Dungeon Port - Darkest Dungeon port in Unity engine with multiplayer. Almost completely identical to the original game.
Reinisch Open Source

Ezy-Slice - An open source mesh slicer framework for Unity3D Game Engine.
David Arayan Open Source

Destructible sprites with polygon colliders - Simple destructible unity sprites.
thgil Open Source

IsoMesh - IsoMesh is a group of related tools for Unity for converting meshes into signed distance field data, raymarching signed distance fields, and extracting signed distance field data back to meshes via surface nets or dual contouring. All the work is parallelized on the GPU using compute shaders.
EmmetOT Open Source

ColafeScript - ColafeScript (COnsole LAnguage For Events) is a simple runtime scripting language for the Unity game engine.
Lucinotion Open Source

LineBurst - Draw large amounts of debug lines, shapes and text to the Unity Game and Scene View, from BURST compiled jobs or MonoBehaviours.
bassmit Open Source

LDtkToUnity - A fully-featured Unity importer for LDtk (Level Designer Toolkit)
Cameron Krebbers Open Source

Map Toolbox for Autoware. - This a unity plugin helps user create lanelet2 maps for Autoware efficiently.
autocore-ai Open Source

Unity selected objects History Window - A simple selection history window for Unity.
acoppes Open Source

RiptideNetworking - C# Networking Library - RUDP (Reliable UDP) networking solution built in C#, primarily intended for use in multiplayer games. Features an unreliable channel (regular UDP) as well as a reliable channel (UDP with loss detection). Works in Unity & console apps alike.
tom-weiland Open Source

RestClient for Unity - This HTTP/REST Client is based on Promises to avoid the Callback Hell and the Pyramid of doom working with Coroutines in Unity.
proyecto26 Open Source

SimpleGraphQL For Unity - SimpleGraphQL is just that -- a simple GraphQL client that is mostly code based and works with Unity.
LastAbyss Open Source

UnityEditorIcons - Build in unity editor icons browser - explore all them icons within the editor itself!
nukadelic Open Source

uFrame - An experimental and programmatic approach to make floating and dragging windows in unity based on Unity UI.
cemuka Open Source

Scriptable Events - Simple and extensible event system implemented via ScriptableObject.
chark Open Source

Unity DataBinding - Data Binding is a unity library that supports binding user interface elements to custom data type (=ViewModel) properties.
JochenHeckl Open Source

SuperUnityBuild - A powerful automation tool for quickly and easily generating builds with Unity.
superunitybuild Open Source

Unity - Mulligan Renamer - The Mulligan Renamer tool for Unity allows for quick and safe renaming of many assets or GameObjects all at once.
redbluegames Open Source

Unity Timer - Run actions after a delay in Unity3D.
Mr-sB Open Source

ProceduralMotionTrack - This is an implementation of a custom timeline track that controls an object transform with simple procedural motions.
keijiro Open Source

RTUtils - RenderTexture utilities for direct drawing meshes, texts and sprites and converting to Texture2D.
nothke Open Source

Light Beam / Laser Performance Package for Unity - This package can create light beam performance with Unity's timeline functionality.
kodai100 Open Source

URP Sun Shafts - A URP port of Unity's classic Standard Assets Effects package's Sun Shaft effect.
ryanslikesocool Open Source

Selfdriving Car AI and Simulator - This project contains a neural network for driving a car in a simulator. The simulator is also part of the project.
Aggrathon Open Source

Spotlight

The Lightbringer - The Lightbringer is a poetic adventure/puzzle platformer with light combat elements, set in a beautiful world claimed by a vile corruption. Guided by your sister’s spirit, you must prevail where she could not. Cleanse the corruption, become The Lightbringer.
Rock Square Thunder

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.