Game Dev Digest Issue #84 - Learning, Tips, and Free Courses

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

A ton of great content this week, I'm sure there is at least something for everyone. Check out Steven Yau's compilation, and if you've been procrastinating about learning to write shaders now is the perfect chance with Freya Holmér's YouTube course. Some great assets to get you going at the end including an excellent decal system and an explosion package you can get both for free!

Unity3D - Personal Notebook - @yaustar has collected an AMAZING 100+ page 'notebook' of amazing UnityTips that has a ton of invaluable gamedev information! [via @gekido]
Steven Yau

Particle Metaballs in Unity using URP and Shader Graph Part 1 - This series will explain how to draw Metaballs in Unity using the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) and Shader Graph. But that’s not all! It’ll also explain how to use a Particle System to control the size and position of our Metaballs.
bronsonzgeb.com

FXAA - Fast approXimate Anti-Aliasing. This is the 17th part of a tutorial series about creating a custom scriptable render pipeline. It covers the implementation of the FXAA antialiasing algorithm.
catlikecoding.com

Jellyfish Shader Breakdown - This shader displaces vertices based on Sine waves in order to animate a Jellyfish mesh. This is a useful alternative to animating using bones, especially for meshes which would require a large number of bones to achieve a similar looking animation.
Cyanilux

Create an Item Editor with UI Elements without uss and uxml in Unity - I've been following UI Elements since its preview release. Often, I tried from their examples repo but couldn't dig in so much and this time I'll make a little editor tool walkthrough.
Cem Ugur Karacam

Videos

Shaders for Game Devs - Shaders for Game Devs is now live on youtube!! This is an actual three part course I taught to game dev students at FuturegamesEDU, complete with assignments, assets, visually driven teaching, and why shaders are hecka neat~ [Part 2, and Part 3]
Freya Holmér

Stylized Grass in Unity URP! Compute Shaders, Layered Mesh, and Clip! | Game Dev Tutorial - Grass is one of those things that almost every game needs, but is really hard to make! I hope to help with that with this series on grass. This grass renderer uses a compute shader to generate a blade grass mesh once in the editor. At runtime, it uses the vertex function of a graphics shader to animate wind and reduce repeated patterns.
Ned Makes Games

Unity Basics - How to Reverse Engineer Effects - Shader Graph has made shader-making in Unity a lot more approachable, but sometimes it's still difficult to know exactly what to look for when you're basing your shaders on something you've seen elsewhere, whether it's another game or the real world.
Daniel Ilett

How to create a 2D Arcade Style Top Down Car Controller in Unity tutorial Part 1 - In this video I’ll show you how to create a simple but very effective 2D arcade style top down steering car controller in Unity from scratch. Download complete project here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/axwyfpm8e4t...​
Pretty Fly Games

How to Draw Trajectory For Physics Throw Using Velocity Or Force | Unity 3D Tutorial | Part 1 - This Unity tutorial covers how to predict and draw trajectory for physics-based velocity or force shooting of 3d gameobjects using line renderer in Unity.
Devsplorer

Custom Overworld Movement Walk System | Bushido Devlog #19 | Game State - Showing off our Custom Walk System for Bushido. This implementation bypasses using Unity's colliders and instead reads vertex data from meshes and height data from Unity's terrain system to create a field of custom triangles to read in and place the character on.
Super Game Bros.

Assets

Asset Passport Sale - Unity is launching the Asset Passport Sale! This world building themed sale runs through March 15, 2021, and more than 100 assets will be available at 50% off, including top tools, environments, fantasy and sci-fi worlds, and more. Including assets like MTree - Tree Creation, SECTR COMPLETE 2019, Vegetation Studio Pro, MapMagic 2 Bundle, and plenty more!
Unity Affiliate

Dynamic Decals by Llockham-Industries - Dynamic Decals is the decal solution built from the ground up to be fast, easy to use and flexible. Perfect for bullet holes, blood effects, projected UI elements and just about anything else you can think of! This solution was developed by Llockham-Industries and originally sold in the Unity Asset Store. The author gave their permission to open source the project as it still works for Unity's Built-in Render Pipeline.
EricFreeman Open Source

Unity Libre Fracture - Unity Libre Fracture is a free and open source fracture system developed for Unity Engine.
Dmitry Senyushkin Open Source

SerializableTupleCollection - After some serious thinking, trying and failing, I finally found a way to implement serializable dictionaries properly in Unity. It's not even much code.
Fredrik Ludvigsen Open Source

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

VFXGraph-Workshop - HDRP VFX-Graph workshop samples that go through some of the basic building blocks of working with particles in VFX-Graph. The samples go over waves, noise, point caches, textures, buffers, interactivity and more. Feel free to explore and use the samples!
Kodrin Open Source

DevDebug.cs - TIL that Debug.Log() is not stripped out at release builds. you can workaround the issue by using this basic wrapper as a starting point.
Ruben de la Torre Open Source

ConvertTexturesToPNG.cs - Convert all TGA, TIFF, PSD and BMP (customizable) Textures to PNG to reduce the project size without any quality loss in Unity
yasirkula Open Source

Unity Utils - A set of single-script Unity utilities I created or collected over the many years of gamedev. Includes GizmosX, SingletonScriptableObject, Closest, RenderTexture utils, reverb param calculation, ObjectPreviewer, BoundsUtils, LabelDrawer, BezierUtility, and ArrayRandomExtension.
Ivan Notaros Open Source

Begin Programming: Build Your First Mobile Game - Learn new skills with a flexible online course.
futurelearn.com

Rope.cs - HingeJoint-based rope building component
staggartcreations Open Source

Spotlight

Scars Of Honor - Scars of Honor is a brand-new F2P MMORPG game, currently in development.

A MMoRPG FROM the Community FOR the Community! The Project which brings your ideas and dreams to reality.

Progressive Dungeons & Raids. Dungeon & Raids scenarios scaling with you! No more useless bosses at Max Level. We present to you the Scaling System starting from Level 10 to Level 50. Improved Loots and Boss mechanics as you progress.
[You can sign up for their pre-alpha test now]
Beast Burst Entertainment

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