This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Let's kick 2021 off right...

Become a better Unity developer with these tips from the community - Every Tuesday, Unity users share their best tips on Twitter with the #UnityTips tag. We’ve put together a list of the top tips from the past four months to help you enhance your visuals and improve your workflows. Get ready to take your Unity skills to the next level!
Unity

Four More Techniques for Faster Unity 3D Development - In this series of articles, I list a few techniques in Unity that can speed up your prototyping skills.
Yvens Serpa

Compilation of Useful Unity Twitter Tips - Below is a compilation of useful tips for Unity 3D gathered from around the Twitter.
sharpcoderblog.com

Pathfinding With NavMesh: Getting Started - Characters in a game often need to navigate around obstacles in the level. Because this is such a common situation in games, Unity provides a built-in pathfinding solution, called NavMesh. In this tutorial, you’ll implement point-and-click movement using NavMesh.
raywenderlich.com

Unity Ray-Tracing: Get Started Now (Short Tutorial) - If you read my visual series on Unity ray-tracing effects, I might have motivated you to give it a try.
The Gamedev Guru

Shaders for Game Devs - A course by Freya Holmér for students at FutureGames shared publicly with permission
Freya Holmér

Render Scale - This is the 16th part of a tutorial series about creating a custom scriptable render pipeline. It's about decoupling the render resolution from the target buffer size.
catlikecoding.com

Basic Tessellation setup in URP - In this post I'm going over the most basic tessellated shader in URP.
Minions Art

Explore, learn and create with the new HDRP Scene template - We are excited to share our brand-new template for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), which helps beginners get started with multi-room lighting setups, physically based lighting intensities, and much more.
Unity

How to create a new Unity template from scratch - I teach Unity a lot. Whenever I have an intro course, the first thing my students see is the default Unity project – which, to me, has some issues. So a good chunk of the first workshop is taken up with setting up the project correctly. I know I can make a sample project, and distribute that project, but there's something unsatisfying about it. I want to be able to have a good, clean template available from Unity Hub.
www.lucashaley.com

Your Questions: Cloud Content Delivery and Addressables - The Addressable Asset System is a vital feature for many Unity users – particularly those with lots of content to manage. We’ve noticed some questions about using Cloud Content Delivery to deliver those assets to players, so here’s a quickstart guide.
Unity

The different lists allowed in IComponentData - Unity’s ECS is very different in that it requires a subset of C# if you want to take advantage of the Burst compiler.
COFFEE BRAIN GAMES

Automated 2D Animation Creation - If you’re familiar at all with Unity animations and the animation controller, you already know the entire workflow can be very repetitive for each new asset you add to your project. The solution I have is specifically for 2D, but I’m sure this can be done similarly for 3D as well.
phantom-games.com

How to create a glow effect in your Unity 2D project - I wanted to write this tutorial for anyone else that might want to add glow effects to their projects and to hopefully avoid them having to ride the struggle bus like I did.
thehardestwork.com

Unity Multiplayer Tutorial using Photon PUN - Photon is a networking engine and multiplayer platform that can handle all the requests on their servers, and through the Unity (or other game engines) we can consume it, add the logic in our projects, focus on gameplay and features and let the part of the networking to Photon.
Uriel Carrillo

Modularity Boost with New Input System in Unity - Get started with the new input system to add cross-platform support in your games with a modular approach.
Emre Yilmaz

Managing and hosting your own Unity Package Manager - As Unity has started to move a lot of their tools and extension into packages within the Package Manager. It would be great if we could host our own re-usable unity packages within it, Well you can!
alanyeats.com

Whitelist RuleTile - If you’ve done a project using Tilemaps in Unity, you probably know about 2d-extras, the official Unity Github repo thats loaded with handy extensions to the base Tilemap kit. One of the keey components of 2d-extras is the RuleTile - a Tile that will render a unique sprite depending on the neighbours of the tile. This is extremely handy for 2D games, as it prevents a developer from having to write rules for tons of unique tiles (hence the name!).
kpdwyer.github.io

Name-and-Password System - This article explains the mechanism Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse uses to save and restore game state through the medium of passwords.
meatfighter.com

Videos

The Trick I Used to Make Combat Fun! | Devlog - Combat keeps the player engaged as they explore my game, so I improved how the enemy interacts with the player and their environment. This tweak made combat so fun that a tester spent over an hour repeatedly fighting a handful of enemies. At this point I knew I had an engaging combat system!
Game Endeavor

Cinemachine Confiner - Camera Bounding Box Unity Tutorial - Confine your Cinemachine camera to a specific area!
samyam

Ice Refraction in Shader Graph and URP - Now that 2020 is almost over and the new year is upon us, here in the Northern Hemisphere it's getting pretty chilly. What better time to make an ice shader? In this video, learn how to read pixels that have already been rendered to the screen and use those to fake a refraction effect!
Daniel Ilett

Unity Basics - Introduction to Shader Graph - Shader Graph is often seen as a "friendlier" route to making shaders in Unity than code. Learn how to set up Shader Graph and build your own graphs using the simplest nodes and properties in this Unity Basics tutorial!
Daniel Ilett

Character Movement in Unity 3D | New Input System + Root Motion Explained - Learn to move characters in Unity 3D with this beginner-friendly explanation of Unity's new input system and root motion!
Nicky B

Getting Started with Compute Shaders in Unity - Let's take a look at how we can use Compute Shaders and Compute Buffers to take some of the work that your CPU struggles with and offload it onto the GPU instead.
Game Dev Guide

Trampled Grass! Add Simple Interaction to Unity URP Shader Graph Grass ✔ï¸Â 2020.2 | Game Dev Tutorial - Grass renderers are complicated! I've explored a few different ways to handle them, and in this video, I'll add character interaction, or trampling, to my shader graph implementation. I show how to create a renderer feature to upload character positions to shaders, and then how to access that data in a shader graph.
Ned Makes Games

Setting up a Dedicated Server for a Multiplayer Game in Unity - In this video, we'll set up a dedicated server on AWS for our multiplayer game built with Unity and Mirror.
Shrine Wars

Swipe Detection + Trail Effect w/ New Input System - Unity Tutorial - Detect swipes and it's direction with the new input system in Unity 2020. I also show how to add a trail renderer for a cool swipe effect.
samyam

Don't You Dare Say Showstopper: Bootstrapping Your Own QA Team - In this 2017 GDC talk, USC Games' Jesse Vigil explains how they built a test group from rookies, volunteers, and only two working test kits to get Chambara through PlayStation 4 submissions with a perfect score on the first try.
GDC

Assets

Task Atlas - LAUNCH SALE: 50% off, only $25 for a limited time! Will be $50 regular price.

FINISH YOUR GAME with Task Atlas! Introducing Task Atlas! The most unique Project Management tool for Unity!

Are you tired of getting lost in your own scene? Can’t remember that big idea you had last week? Ever load up Unity and just stare blankly for 10 minutes trying to figure out what to spend your valuable time on next?

What if a single click could show you everything you’re working on right in the Scene view? Imagine having an interactive Atlas for your world?

Zoom right in, and stick notes all over your level. Build a river here… Fix a texture’s UV here... Add an NPC there…

Keep track of where you are by adding Labels to your areas, which fade when far and even tell you how many units away it is!

Get there fast by clicking on a Landmarks image and teleporting there.

It’s an all in one bookmarking, sticky noting, task management, auto Atlas, and more! And this is just the start, many additional features are planned.

Once you try Task Atlas you’ll quickly realise organising your Unity project INSIDE Unity just makes sense and will save tons of time.
ShrinkRay Entertainment Affiliate

PixelOver - PixelOver is a software to transform your arts to pixel arts as best as possible. As a pixel artist, you can use it to quickly make accurate drafts of your sketchs. As digital painter or 3D modeler, you can use this software to fit your arts with your whole pixel art games.
Deakcor

Unity Source Movement - An adaptation of the Source engine's movement mechanics in Unity, including strafe jumping, surfing, bunnyhopping, swimming, crouching and jump-crouching (optional), as well as sliding (optional). The player can also push rigidbodies around.
Olezen Open Source

Baker Boy - A tiny GPU-based ambient occlusion and bent normal baker for Unity.
Fewes Open Source

Pugrad - Pugrad is a color gradient generator for Unity that supports commonly-used perceptually uniform colormaps.
keijiro Open Source

Toon Shader - I ported the simple toon shader from my tutorials over to URP without so much as touching ShaderGraph, you can check out how I did it here if you want any insight into how to get by without any dang nodes
Manuela Malasaña Open Source

XibLitDissolve - YOOO check THIS out. This is a wholly original shader, not a port, completely hand coded in URP, no dang graphs! and how did I pull it off? I invite you to examine my work for yourself.
Manuela Malasaña Open Source

Muffin Dev Core Library - Contains base tools and helpers to improve game development in Unity.
Muffin Dev Open Source

Scene Inspector - You will no longer insert the wrong scene name when typing it in the string field. In addition, you can decide to load a scene using the Path or a Build Index, without worrying about changing scene information in case something changes in the project.
What this allows you to do:
Working on Unity version 2020.1 or later.
It will be tested on previous versions of Unity
RGSMS Open Source

âš›ï¸Â Unity Atoms - Tiny modular pieces utilizing the power of Scriptable Objects
Unity Atoms is derived from and a continuation of Ryan Hipple's talk from Unite 2017. The original source code can be found here.
This talk by Richard Fine is a forerunner to Ryan Hipple's talk during Unite 2016.
AdamRamberg Open Source

Spotlight

Phantom Proxy - Earth is gone. The only remains of humanity are kept alive in cyberspace afterlife. Only the wealthiest individuals uploaded their souls into the hedonistic binary abyss. Their servers maintained by the working class software living in sub-level decaying pixels.
Acheronti

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.