Game Dev Digest Issue #143 - AI And Level Design

Back this week with another issue filled with a little something for everybody. Enjoy!

Profiling in Unity 2021 LTS: What, when, and how - Developing expertise with Unity’s suite of profiling tools is one of the most useful skills you can add to your game development toolbox. Thorough profiling can massively boost the performance of your game, so we want to help you get started with key tips from our newly released e-book, Ultimate guide to profiling Unity games.
Unity

Geodesic Octasphere. Tracing Lines on a Sphere - This is the ninth tutorial in a series about procedural meshes. This time we use geodesic lines to position the vertices of an octasphere.
catlikecoding.com

Signed Distance Fields - Signed Distance Functions allow you to generate graphics that can be applied to a surface in a game. Unlike textures, SDF masks can be resolution-independant, require almost zero memory, and can be parameterised to animate in ways that are simply impossible with textures alone. They are a powerful and essential tool in a technical artists toolbelt.
digitalsalmon.co.uk

How do Video Games Stay in Sync? An Intro to the Fascinating Networking of Real Time Games. - Have you ever wondered how real-time games can keep multiple clients in sync even when there are large latencies between users? How can you see other players reacting to your actions near instantly, in spite of the fact that the communication between your computer and the server is not instant? [More discussion here]
Eric Lastname

How To Work Out The Size of Sprites & Game World - When you are making a new pixel art game, how do you work out what size to make your sprites? How many pixels should you display on the screen at one time? It’s something I review every time I start a new game. Here are some quick tips to think about.
stuartspixelgames.com

DOTS Snippets: Populating native collections in parallel - Here we go again writing DOTS code without the aid of Entities.ForEach(). This time, let’s tackle something simple but common: populating native collections like NativeArray, NativeList, or NativeMultiHashMap in parallel with Burst enabled.
Coffee Brain Games

Smoke, mirrors, and scrolling textures: Behind the scenes of TUNIC - Indie creator Andrew Shouldice (ISOMETRICORP Games) joined Unity on Twitch at GDC to share some of the secrets behind his action-adventure game.
Unity

Videos

Death Stranding's Biggest Problem? Teaching the AI to Walk | AI and Games - Death Stranding is all about walking. The AAA walking simulator tasks players with delivering packages to isolated corners of a post-apocalyptic United States. It presents a rich and challenging environment for players to navigate, and this leads to the biggest problem developers at Kojima Productions had to tackle. How do you teach the AI to walk in a game that breaks so many conventions of how you move around the world? Let's find out!
AI and Games

'Real World Level Design' & 'Playgrounds and Level Design' - In these 2019 Level Design Workshop sessions, Jerry Belich and Andrew Yoder rapid fire some lessons learns from applying video game level design techniques in unusual or unexpected ways.
GDC

Improving Ragdoll Physics (Unity Tutorial) - In this Unity tutorial we're going to look at how we can refine and improve the Ragdoll physics that are generated by the Unity Ragdoll Wizard.
Ketra Games

How to Implement Save Slots to Manage Multiple Saved Games in Unity | 2022 tutorial - In this video, I show how to implement Save Slots to manage multiple saved games by expanding on the Save & Load System created through two previous tutorials.
Trever Mock

Realistic Glass Material in Unity HDRP (Unity 2022 Tutorial) - Let's make a photo realistic glass material in Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) by using a simple transparent material, choosing the smoothness value and changing some of the refraction settings. It's very important to use Reflection probes but I will show this in the video!
SpeedTutor

Visual Effects Summit: How to (Not) Create Textures for VFX - The topic wasn’t discussed too much in the past and as I often struggle(d) making cool textures, I thought making a talk about it could help and maybe spark inspiration to others to talk more about this specific subject and share more knowledge.
Simon Trumpler

This New Audio Tool is a Must-Add To Your #GameDev Toolbox! - Explorer is a new free audio tool from Sound Particles. It's a must have for game developers and musicians managing a large collection of audio files. Flawlessly handle audio in any format and any encoding, easily export, manage, search, sorta and more. And special FX, fades etc. Really, its a must have, especially given that price tag.
Gamefromscratch

Intro to Characters & Classes - Learn with LootLocker - Make classes and characters for your games easily. Use this to make warriors, wizards, factions, teams, guilds and more. Fits all types of games such as roguelikes, RPG games, mmorpgs, but can also be useful for other games such as platformers or fighting games. Use it to make an inventory system for your game to handle items, assets, loot box, loot crate, ability cooldown, equipping, unequipping, drop tables, loot tables, customization, soft currency and more for your game economy to increase revenue, playability, retention or an in-game store in your game.
LootLocker

Assets

Unity Publisher Sale - All individual assets from 4 UI Publishers, Layer Lab, Poneti, D.F.Y. Studio, and Rexard, will be on sale for 50% off. Additionally, each of these four publishers is offering one asset as a Flash Deal at a deep discount.
Unity Affiliate

MaterialGradientDrawer.cs - A Material Property Drawer for the [Curve] attribute which lets you edit curves and adds them to the shader as textures. Forked from Ronja's Material Gradient Drawer.
ghysc Open Source

Hibzz DefineManager - A tool used to manage #defines in a project to enable/disable optional features in supported packages and to produce cleaner and more efficient code. It looks and feels close to Unity's package manager, making the tool easy for the users to pick up and use.
Hibzz-Games Open Source

Surface Management System - Create and use a ScriptableObject-based Surface Management system for your game!
llamacademy Open Source

UI Toolkit Plus - Library mostly made of of extension methods. Created to cut down the boilerplate code, that I wrote in every UI Toolkit related scripts.
ErnSur Open Source

AtlasMaker for 2D Dungeon Crawlers - A package for Unity which will allow you to render PNG image atlases to be used when developing first person grid dungeon crawlers. The generated image atlases can be used with any game engine, not just Unity.
zooperdan Open Source

Spatial hashing for Unity using ECS - A spatial hash is one way of indexing objects in space. This package allows you to indexing struct manually or automatically ( via IComponentData) with high speed.
Sylmerria Open Source

IsoSorting - Isometric sorting system for Unity using ECS. You can sort by depth or by order in layer.
Sylmerria Open Source

Camera Movement By Touch - Camera movement in Unity script, specific built for mobile devices
sergane13 Open Source

Frictionless - A lightweight, simple service locator and message router framework for Unity apps.
Claytonious Open Source

Polygon - Polygon is a procedural mesh generator in Unity.
marcelochaves95 Open Source

[Mega Pack] Admurins Freebies - This is a free pack that includes: 416 pixel art icons. This includes weapons, fruits, insects, fishing, skills and more. UI Components Animated objects (chests). 7 Animated enemies (most come with idle, move, hit, death and attack animations). 1 Animated horseman. 1 Platformer tileset. 1 Isometric tileset (minecraft inspired).
[See also their Reddit post]
@admurin

Classrooms Asset Pack - Hey , here's classroom asset pack, chairs, tables, shelfs, chalks... everything is here.
styloo.itch.io

Unity Developer Console - Open a console with a button press in play mode or any build to run commands or custom cheat codes.
sundiray.itch.io

URP Grab Pass - Replacement for GrabPass in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP).
Haruma-K Open Source

Cube - Cube is a complete library for game multiplayer support for Unity games. It's simple to use while being robust and scalable (16+ players). It's best suited for action games with little static data.
MKSQD Open Source

BitPacking - A c# Bit packing implementation for unity and Mirage Networking and PositionSyncSystem
James-Frowen Open Source

Tileable Texture Generation. - This project is based on the rather old aperiodical texturing project found on the GPU gems website which is in turn based on wang tiles and the fast texture synthesis paper.
Scrawk Open Source

Math Utils - The Math Utils package provides extensions and utilities for working with numbers in Unity projects including processing inputs, generating random numbers, and much more.
zigurous Open Source

Unity Package Exporter - This library will export a series of files from a Unity3D project into a Unity Package (.unitypackage).
Lachee Open Source

Cratesmith.AssetUI - Popout Inspector and ScriptableObject aware default Object Drawer for Unity3d.
Cratesmith Open Source

Serially - Adds a unity-supported, SerializableType class and an inspector for editing SerializeReference fields.
CareBoo Open Source

SimpleAI - Coroutine-based utility AI for Unity3d. Includes an Unreal inspired perception and environment query system.
OneManMonkeySquad Open Source

CC0 Textures Importer - The CC0 Textures Importer package provides a Unity editor integration for importing textures and materials directly from ambientcg.com by utilizing their public API.
zigurous Open Source

Scene View Bookmarks - Unity editor extension that adds scene view bookmarks, allowing you to quickly return the scene camera to preset positions.
mminer Open Source

Prefab Palette - Prefab Palette allows you to put your frequently used prefabs somewhere easy to reach so you don't need to move form a folder to another to find a prefab and put it in the scene.
alirezaft Open Source

Spotlight

Captain of Industry - Colony and factory simulation game. Alone with your loyal crew, expand a small colony of survivors into an industrial empire! From an abandoned island to vast factories, research labs, and space program. Build, mine, farm, shape terrain, explore, trade, and take care of your settlement!

[Also check out their post on Hacker News]
MaFi Games

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