Issue #174 — Designing UI, And More!

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Designing UI, graphics, pathfinding, and lost more in this issue. Enjoy!

Platforming Tips and Tricks — As a game developer it is your job to make the character move as the player wants, NOT how the player inputs controls. Even if you think your niche is having a very hard game that only makes it more important that your controls are forgiving. [With playable demo in the browser of each mechanic] davetech.co.uk

Extreme Pathfinding — It gets tricky when you start looking for paths for hundreds of units! [How to smooth and spread A* paths for an RTS, also read the Hacker News discussion] construct.net

Unity’s Animator Controller as a State Machine — After reading about the use of Animator Controller state machines as a general purpose state machine in Unity AI Game Programming, Second Edition we decided to try out the concept and used it to control the game states. irenenaya.medium.com

Best practices for mobile UI design — part 1 — Mobile UI design can be challenging, and with the number of games and devices growing at an exponential rate, crafting the most performant game has become a major priority. Unity

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update) — A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk! donhopkins.medium.com

Everything you need to know about Memory Profiler 1.0.0 — The new Memory Profiler — version 1.0.0 — delivers improvements to the profiling suite that offer a more complete view of memory usage and make it easier and faster to optimize performance or detect memory issues. Unity

How to debug — As engineers we spend a lot of our time debugging problems, yet it’s rarely taught as a skill in its own right. philbooth.me

Paddle Square — This is the first tutorial in a series about prototypes. In it we will create a simple Pong clone. catlikecoding.com

Videos

The Overlooked Secret Behind Realistic Graphics — Present in every game cinematic you’ve ever seen and now making its way to real time rendering, depth of field is one of the most, if not the most important effect for taking your graphics to the next level. Acerola

Procedurally generating a Cyberpunk City — This is the final devlog of our month long game challenge, and for the last week I needed a proper city, now I could spend 5 hours placing it by hand, or 12 hours coding a system to generate the terrain, and since Im luckily to bad at math, Ill teach you (wildly oversimplify) how I generated it using Wave Function Collapse and if you keep watching Ill let you know how you can get the code to do this yourself. TJ

Wwise Now FREE For Indie Developers!* — WWise, one of the most popular AAA audio middleware solutions, is now free for indie developers. So long as you have a budget less than 250K USD, you can use this fully functioning, non-asset limited version to author audio for your game. Gamefromscratch

Creating a Horror Score on a Shoestring Budget — In this GDC 2021 talk, learn the tools for creative composition, orchestration, and decision-making within the confines of an extremely tight budget. GDC

Making a small sailing game in Unity — Indie Devlog #2 — An indie devlog A Beginner’s Dev Vlog

How Aim Assist systems in BLAM (Halo)-based Engines Works — [Video analysis of aim assist] reddit.com

Classic Postmortem: GoldenEye 007 — In this 2012 GDC Europe Talk, Martin Hollis shares how his team created Goldeneye 007, the biggest release for the N64 without Mario in its title, and how what started as a Virtua Cop-style on-rails project became the legendary FPS that paved the way for console shooters like Halo and countless others. GDC

Assets

The Lunar New Year Mega Bundle — We’re racing into 2023 with the Lunar New Year Mega Bundle! You can save up to 95% off fantastic, curated sets of art and tool assets in the new mega bundle!

$29.99 Bundle — save up to 60% This bundle contains: Sprite Shaders Ultimate, Wyrms, and Sci-Fi Turret Constructor.

$39.99 Bundle — save up to 79% This bundle contains everything from the $29.99 bundle, plus Shiny URP Power-Ups, SciFi Space Base, and Exporter for Unreal to Unity 2023.

$44.99 Bundle — save up to 95% This bundle contains everything from the $29.99 and $39.99 bundles, plus Warrior Pack Mega Bundle, Easy AR : Make Awesome AR Apps Without Coding, Sci-Fi Sound Pack, Ivy Studio — Procedural vine generation, Grabbit — Editor Physics Transforms, Flexalon 3D Layouts, Smooth Sync, Powerslide Kart Physics, ProTips — Tooltip System, SensorToolkit 2, Skill & Attack Indicators, and Pixelate. Unity Affiliate

New Evergreen Bundle — This starter pack bundle is designed for new developers and creators. It includes 7 assets and tools, covering key aspects for game building including 3D models, music, textures, background and scripting. This bundle is only available through February 6. Unity Affiliate

FREE 100+ Song Music Library! — Use the songs however you want! If you’re kind you will give credit to me, SuloSounds but it’s okay if you don’t want or forget! sulosounds.itch.io

Look At Transformation Matrix — This repo contains the code for animating a statue with a look at transformation matrix and no rigging. IRCSS Open Source

Gameframe.StatSheet — Statsheet system for Role Playing Game style character stats coryleach Open Source

Unity-UI-Rounded-Corners — These components and shaders allow you to add rounded corners to UI elements! kirevdokimov Open Source

Ink-Fungus Gateway Template — The Ink-Fungus Gateway is (no surprise here) a gateway between Ink and Fungus. Ink is a scripting language for interactive fiction, developed by Inkle. Fungus is a visual storytelling and scripting tool for Unity. maurovanetti Open Source

GitMerge-for-Unity — A Unity plugin which allows you to merge scene and prefab files when using git. FlaShG Open Source

Unity 3D Game Development Super Book Bundle — By Packt — Learn the art & science of Unity game development. Build your skills in every facet of Unity 3D game development with this comprehensive bundle of books and video courses from Packt! Through a mix of hands-on projects and expert knowledge, you’ll learn how to code in C#, build 3D models and art using Blender, and get an understanding of making games for mobile platforms. Read, watch, and start creating, and choose how much of your purchase helps us support Starlight Children’s Foundation below! Includes: Hands-On Unity 2022 Game Development, Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity, Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity and more! Humble Bundle Affiliate

Unity Mesh Transfer Tool — A Unity Editor utility that can transfer skinned mesh renderers from one armature to another. This does not automatically weight anything, it just lets you use a mesh on a specified armature instead of only the one it was imported with. CascadianWorks Open Source

Arc Raycast — Arc raycast utility using projectile formulas williamrjackson Open Source

SpriteOutlineFx — SpriteOutlineFx is an image effect which adds outlines to sprites. keijiro Open Source

Anone Can Learn To Code — The Complete 2023 Online Course — Become a programming pro. Learn coding fundamentals and become a software development master with this massive bundle from the training experts at Mammoth Interactive! Through dozens of online courses, you’ll learn the essential tools, languages, and techniques you need to build websites, mobile apps, Unity and Unreal Engine games, and much more. Pay what you want and choose how much of your purchase helps us support Starlight Children’s Foundation below! Humble Bundle Affiliate

Simple rope simulation for Unity — A simple rope experiment. I connected 80 rigidbodies with Spring Joints and rendered them with Line Renderer using Catmull-Rom spline interpolation. korinVR Open Source

[DependencyAttributes] Atreebooster DI — The Hierarchy-based Dependency Injection tool. Intuitivly manage dependencies of your MonoBehaviours with simple but powerfull [Attributes] kubpica Open Source

PSX Shader Kit (FREE) — Shaders for achieving a console-accurate PS1 aesthetic. Currently only the built-in rendering pipeline is supported. Valerie Moza Affiliate

Get Into Music Variety Pack Software Bundle — Start making music today. Got a song in your heart and want to share it with the world? Pick up this variety-packed bundle and start composing! Build an instant virtual studio with synthesizers, the award-winning Boom 3D audio enhancer and equalizer, instruments, and more essential tools. Get a library of loops, SFX, MIDI files, presets, and more sounds to help you unleash your creativity. Score $1,000+ worth of audio software, and help support Direct Relief with your purchase. Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Super Adventure Hand — Hands down the most adventurous and handsome hand in the world! You play as a hand on a gripping handventure where you single-handedly face numerous obstacles and avoid a handful of terrible feet.

[You can download the demo now on Steam, visit their website and follow them on Twitter] Devm Games

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