Game Dev Digest Issue #133 - State Of Games In 2022

Tons this week including multiplayer stacks, cloth, rope, hair, game tutorials and more. Enjoy!

Unity Gaming Report 2022: Five insights on the gaming industry today - Read on to learn about five insights on the state of the gaming industry today, to hone your strategy for making better games and running a stronger business.
Unity

What Valve Says About Steam In 2022 - Last month Valve conducted a Q&A with the Slovak Game Developers Association. I love to watch these Valve Q&As because they bring a check to all my wild theorizing. I truly respect Valve for being so open.
howtomarketagame.com

I hired an ad agency and spent $6K advertising my game's Kickstarter. Was it worth it? (answer: sort of) Numbers inside. - I could probably write 5 different blog posts on what I've learned during this campaign, but I'll focus specifically on my experience hiring an ad agency and running ads for the campaign.
reddit.com

How to Make Flappy Bird with Online Leaderboards - Let’s make a Flappy Bird game with Unity and LootLocker. We’ll call it… FlappyLoot.
lootlocker.io

Codemagic: Developing an Ultimate CI/CD Solution for Unity Developers - Codemagic's Solutions Engineer Kevin Suhajda has told us about Codemagic, a mobile CI/CD provider, explained what CI/CD and DevOps are, and discussed the benefits of the company's recently-announced tool.
80.lv

Why Hair In Video Games Is So Hard To Do Well - There’s a quip in an old Tim Rogers video about Hitman 2, where Agent 47 is bald because "it's 2018 and they still can't get hair right".
kotaku.com.au

Verlet Rope in Games - For the past month and a bit I’ve been working on a (2D) game which uses a rope as a core mechanic. I expected this to be challenging, but was (unsurprisingly) caught by a bunch of things and learnt some valuable lessons along the way, which I’m hoping to document here.
toqoz.fyi

Raising your game with Burst 1.7 - The latest version of the Burst package comes with some great improvements to both iteration time and the Burst Inspector. In this post, we’ll look at what’s changed and how our High Performance C# (HPC#) compiler technology can now help you improve performance on all platforms with even greater ease.
Unity

DOTS Snippets: Using EntityCommandBuffer in parallel - First up in this series is how to use an EntityCommandBuffer (ECB) in a job that runs in parallel.
Coffee Brain Games

Creating Reusable Characters With Blender and Unity - Characters in video games are often as memorable as the accompanying gameplay and music. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to prepare a humanoid model using Blender and how to bring it into Unity.
raywenderlich.com

Nine use cases for Unity’s Game Backend tools - By using Unity’s Game Backend suite, particularly with other Unity Gaming Services, you can focus on creating content while we handle the heavy lifting. Find out below what Unity’s Cloud Code, Cloud Save, Economy, and Authentication can do for you.
[Also, A closer look at Game backend]
Unity

Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 12 - Unity 2022.1.0 Beta 12 has been released.
Unity

Videos

Trailer Made: What Makes a Successful and Memorable Game Trailer - In this 2019 GDC session, trailer editor Derek Lieu teaches you what makes a successful game trailer and the key questions to ask during production. Lieu also sketches out a list of the easily fixable, but extremely common pitfalls many game trailers fall into.
GDC

My Favorite Way To Make A GAME OVER Menu In Unity - A Game Over menu is actually incredibly simple, but how to implement one really can depend on the type of game your making.
BMo

Unity Code Optimization - Do you know them all? - Find what common Unity optomizations truly make a difference. In this video I go over a bunch of interesting optimization tips as well and give you my recommendations on each.
Tarodev

Make A Game Like Pokemon In Unity Series - [84 videos in the playlist, all about making a Pokemon-like game in Unity!]
Game Dev Experiments

Assets

Unity Asset Store Asset Refresh Sale! - More than 150 new assets that were added recently to the Asset Store are currently available at 50% off, including top new art packs, editor extensions, tools and more.
Unity Affiliate

Ukraine Mega Bundle - Unity Asset Store stands in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the 500+ Unity Asset Store Publishers based in the region.

In light of this, they are holding a new Mega Bundle with 100% of proceeds going to humanitarian charities in support of Ukraine.

Unity and the generous Asset Store Publishers who've agreed to include their assets in this effort, are donating 100% of revenue from this Mega Bundle.
Unity Affiliate

It might be common knowledge but...there are TONS of high quality Public Domain assets. - Almost all have tons of CC0 licensed assets (Public Domain, No Attribution). Almost all have high quality assets. One could make hundreds of good looking/sounding games using these assets.
reddit.com/u/true_adrian_scheff

Realtime-Snow Shader - Realtime snow simulation including snow accumulation and deformation.
jjacobson Open Source

Ultimate Circular Health Bars Lite - A segmented radial health bar shader for Unity 2019 and up.
Renge-Games Open Source

Battleship - Battleship is a turn-based multiplayer game that uses Colyseus (0.13) to employ a client-server architecture. Client code is written in C# to make use of the Unity game engine. Server code is written in TypeScript.
musapkahraman Open Source

NavMeshDemo - Unity client navmesh export to server for pathfinding
JiangZhiYong Open Source

Valve Sockets - Managed C# abstraction of GameNetworkingSockets library by Valve Software.
Stanislav Denisov Open Source

NetStack - Lightweight toolset for creating concurrent networking systems for multiplayer games
Stanislav Denisov Open Source

URasterizer - URasterizer: A software rasterizer on top of Unity, accelerated by Job system & Compute Shader.
happyfire Open Source

Verlet Chains - A chain/rope simulation in Unity using Verlet integration instead of rigidbodies and constraints. Uses GPU Instancing to draw the chain links from a single GameObject script.
GaryM-exkage Open Source

MeshRope - Meshed rope/cable implementation for Unity.
CihadDogan Open Source

GPU Cloth Simulation - GPU Mass-Spring Simulation Cloth in Unity.
JUSTIVE Open Source

Burst Triangulator - A single-file package which provides simple Delaunay triangulation of the given set of points (float2) with mesh refinement.
andywiecko Open Source

Lightmap Switching Tool - Tool that allows switching different baked lightmap sets on a unity scene at runtime.
Laurent Open Source

RuntimeTransformHandle - Runtime transform handle for Unity.
pshtif Open Source

Unity Dropdown - A better-looking dropdown window for Unity Editor that can easily replace GenericMenu in your editor tools.
SolidAlloy Open Source

CSV Parser for C# - Simple CSV Parser for C# without any dependency. (CC0)
yutokun Open Source

Massive RPG Game Development Assets Bundle - On a quest to develop a role-playing game? Take this massive bundle of assets with you! Inside this creators’ treasure chest you’ll find fantastic characters, environment sets, UI elements, music, sounds, and more to make a complete game. Draw upon the 16-Bit Fantasy Sprite Set to build your JRPG-inspired adventure, create a city to explore with the Pixel Fantasy Town Tileset, populate the world with the 2D Fantasy Characters Pack, and lots more. Plus, your purchase will support International Rescue Committee and Direct Relief!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

The Joy Of Coding Bundle - Whether you're a beginner programmer or a practiced pro, nailing a project or solving a tricky problem can be incredibly rewarding. Discover the art and science of coding—and the joy that comes with it—with this bundle of ebooks from No Starch Press featuring Computer Graphics from Scratch, Learn to Code by Solving Problems, Rust for Rustaceans, Introduction to Computer Organization, and more. Plus, your purchase helps support Let's Encrypt and No Starch Press Foundation!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Timemelters - Strategy... Witches... and Time Travel! Featuring a full Co-op campaign and designed by the Co-Creator of Sang-Froid - Tales of Werewolves, Timemelters is a hardcore action-strategy game featuring a unique game mechanic which allows the players to go back in time and fight alongside themselves.

[Wishlist on Steam, and check out their preview on Reddit]
Autoexec Games

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