Game Dev Digest Issue #146 - Dev Hacks

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Devs share their favourite hacks, tips and more. Hopefully something in here you can find inspiration from or learn a thing or two. Enjoy!

Devs Share The Wild, Secret Hacks Your Favorite Games Rely On - Horses made of human skeletons, explosions that are houses, and other weird hacks used by devs to make the games you love
kotaku.com

The Game Makers Who Found Careers As Asset Store Creators - When Jonathan van Immerzeel goes on vacation, he packs a decidedly unusual suitcase. In addition to sunblock, swimming shorts, and a passport, the intrepid creator takes a drone, green screen, and audio recording equipment. This is so that he can document every aspect of his surroundings, usually untouched wilderness, in as much high-fidelity detail as possible. He does so in the name of research, seeking inspiration for his next hit shader, essentially a program that renders graphics, which he then publishes on the Unity Asset Store.
theverge.com

Why player feedback could be the strongest tool in your arsenal - Player feedback is vital when it comes to designing a successful game. It can help you improve the gameplay experience and find bugs, and see your game from different, more objective, perspectives. And it can save you wasting time and money fixing things that don’t need fixing. But getting that feedback can feel like a huge task in an already overwhelming development process. Don’t panic though – we’re here to tell you how to collect, manage, and evaluate feedback both before and after you release your game.
lootlocker.com

Point to click movement with the new Input System & Cinemachine - In this tutorial you’ll move a single character around the scene based on where the player clicks their mouse, having them dodge obstacles and alternate between two types of movements; walking and running. A Cinemachine virtual camera will be used to automatically keep the player in focus while they move around the level.
gamedev-resources.com

Mobile performance optimization with Adaptive Performance 4.0 - Download Unity 2022.1 Tech Stream and discover Adaptive Performance 4.0. Push Android performance even further on Samsung devices with four more scalers that cover physics, decals, customization, and layer culling – plus support for visual scripting to optimize app performance.
Unity

Icosphere - From Octahedron to Icosahedron - Create a seamless octasphere. Convert from octahedron to icosahedron. Make a geodesic icosphere variant. This is the tenth tutorial in a series about procedural meshes. This time we take our octasphere as a starting point and transform it into an icosphere.
catlikecoding.com

Toon Glass Shader Breakdown - This shader produces a toon glass effect, which involves solid diagonal lines across the quad’s surface which move with the camera’s position. This is similar to how glass and window reflections are sometimes portrayed in cartoons/comics/clipart etc.
cyanilux.com

Pathfinding Visualizer - [See discussion on Hacker News or check out the source code]
honzaap

Videos

Camera-Based Movement in Unity 3D Explained - What the heck does all this code mean?! Today we’ll break down every line so that you can move your characters relative to the camera’s rotation in Unity 3D! Learn the basics of Vectors and SPACE and how to transform between the two. Put your programming hat on and let’s get started!
iHeartGameDev

Unity VFX Graph - Level Up Effect Tutorial - In this Unity tutorial we are going to create a Level Up Effect for a character! We are going to see how to spawn particles in a character, how to make it glow and how to time everything right! Enjoy!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Fight That OCD (CUSTOM INSPECTOR Unity) - In this video we will create a custom inspector in Unity. We'll focus on Serializing our fields and properties so we can access private fields. Create dropdowns, toggles, hidden content and showing more when using an enum. We'll look at spacing, labels and more!
SpeedTutor

Photoshop Blend Modes For Games - In this fifth installment of the post processing series we learn about the math behind photoshop blend modes so that we can apply them as a post processing effect for games. Formulas for add, screen, color dodge, subtract, multiply, color burn, overlay, soft light, and vivid light are demonstrated.
Acerola

How to make MINI 2D WORLDS in Unity! - Learn how to create beautiful mini 2D worlds using Unity and Photoshop!
Blackthornprod

GPU Lecture 36: Deconstructing Unity's Standard Shader, Part 1 (GPU Programming for Video Games) - In this lecture I want to take a look at the actual code that implements the Standard shader and try to sort through it.
Lantertronics - Aaron Lanterman

Assets

Procedural Worlds Mega Bundles - This experienced publisher combines the creativity of artists with the latest procedural terrain, landscape and scene generation techniques to enable people to rapidly create anything from low poly games for mobile to vr driving simulations to next gen hd environments across platforms and devices.

$30 Bundle - save up to 62%
This bundle contains: SoulLink Procedural AI Spawner, Fish School Bundle, and Northern Lights Pack.

$35 Bundle - save up to 92%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 bundle, plus Village Exteriors Kit, Cartoon Insect Characters, and Beech Forest Ecosystem.

$40 Bundle - save up to 94%
This bundle contains everything from the $30 and $35 bundle, plus CiDy 2, L.V.E 2019 - Lava & Volcano Environment 2019, Jungle - Tropical Vegetation, Crest Ocean System URP, Massive Clouds Atmos - Volumetric Skybox, Polyverse Skies | Low Poly Skybox Shaders, Global Snow, Ultimate Medieval Constructor, (STP) Survival Template PRO, and InControl.
Unity Affiliate

1000+ sprite sheets with armor, weapons, helmets, shields, hair, and more. 8 frames x 4 directions. Humans, fairies, dragons, demons, skeletons, zombies, wolves, pumpkinheads, and more. Free to use with attribution for commercial and non-commercial products. - Hi everyone. I'm Nathaniel from Rockwell Studios, the creator of Himeko Sutori and Septaroad Voyager. Over the years I have drawn and commissioned over 1000 sprite sheets for my games and I am now releasing them to you to see what you can do with them. They are free to use with attribution, details in the link below. You can download the sprite sheets in a zip file from here
Rockwell Studios

Unity Dependency Toolkit - Tools for discovering, navigating and analysing asset dependencies.
ultraleap Open Source

Fancy Carousel View - Carousel View for Unity uGUI using Fancy Scroll View.
Haruma-K Open Source

FlashGlitch - This is a study project to create a music synchronized flashing effect with Unity Shader Graph.
It needs a .mp4 video file to be fed as a glitch source. Put it in the project directory and rename it to Test.mp4.
keijiro Open Source

Unity-Theme - Create palettes of colors and components for change specific color on a specific visual element. Very useful to UI.
IvanMurzak Open Source

AutoAimBowAndArrow - Automatic aim on target in camera frustrum + 3D arrow trajectory algorithms
mnijaki Open Source

Create Mobile Native Popup Using Unity - Welcome to Native Popups for iOS and Android! This plugin provides easy access from Unity to the native functionality of iOS and Android for displaying popups.
j1mmyto9 Open Source

BMesh for Unity - This Unity package is a library to make runtime procedural mesh generation as flexible as possible.
The mesh structure is similar to the one used in Blender, and a mechanism for adding arbitrary attributes to vertices/edges/loops/faces is available, for instance for people used to Houdini's wrangle nodes.
eliemichel Open Source

What is Master Server Toolkit? - This is a framework that allows you to create game servers and services for your game inside Unity. It allows you to avoid using third-party services such as Playful, PAN, or Smartfox server. This framework does not claim to be a substitute for all these systems. No way!
aevien Open Source

Royalty Free Game Design Music And Audio FX Plugins - 100% royalty-free sounds & pro-quality presets Add killer electronic soundtracks & SFX to your games and visual projects with this massive library of 100% royalty-free sounds & audio effect plugins! This bundle features:

Learn Game Development For Beginners - Press Start on your game dev journey Level up your skills in coding, art, and more game dev fundamentals with these beginners’ online courses from GameDev.tv! Whether you’re interested in building your own game or pursuing a studio career, you’ll get dozens of hours of expert instruction to help you build a foundation in Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, C++, C#, and more. Get the knowledge you need to make your game, and support One Tree Planted with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

The Explorator - Explore mysterious counter-zones and brave dangers to discover priceless treasures buried beneath the ruins of Atlantis.

The explorator is a semi-open fantasy FPS, as an explorer you take your courage in both hands to set foot on the most dangerous island of the known world, Ospolis.

Legends say that the legendary city of Atlantis lies beneath this island, which has been suddenly overrun by goblins and monsters that have emerged from the bowels of the underground tunnels drilled by unwary explorers confident of finding the famous city.

You will have to cross the region zone by zone to get in touch with these explorers surrounded by demons and help them solve the mystery of the attack.

[You can wishlist on Steam, follow on Twitter, and check out their website]

Remnant Games Studio
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