Issue #180 — Old School Techniques

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Get inspired and get things done! Lots to read and learn from this week. Enjoy!

A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack — A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards. blog.moertel.com

Frequently Asked Question About Marketing Your Game — [Some great questions and answers when you are ready to promote your game] howtomarketagame.com

2023 Unity Gaming Report — In a year marked by shifting economic headwinds, creativity and innovation in the gaming industry are still going strong. The 2023 Unity Gaming Report features gaming industry trends and insights from game studios to help you make better decisions as a solo developer or member of an indie, midsize, or large studio. Unity

Eyes, hands, simulation, and samples: What’s new in Unity XR Interaction Toolkit 2.3 — This update adds three key features: eye gaze and hand tracking for more natural interactions, audiovisual affordances to bring interactions to life, and an improved device simulator to test in-Editor. Unity

Implementing satisfying stairs for your 2D top-down game — I will be going over something a bit more specific: how to implement satisfying feeling stairs in a 2D top-down game. For the sake of simplicity, when I talk about “stairs”, I am referring to any incline/decline slope your players can traverse in your levels. Stairs was my first application of this so the terminology just stuck. michael bitzos

Improving job system performance scaling in 2022.2 — part 2: Overhead — The 2022.2 and 2021.3.14f1 releases have improved the scheduling cost and performance scaling of the Unity job system. In part one of this two-part article on what’s new with job systems, I offered some background information on parallel programming and why you might use a job system. For part two, let’s dive deeper into what job system overhead is and Unity’s approach to mitigating it. Unity

Videos

Finding Harmony in Anime Style and Physically Based Rendering — In this 2022 Technical Artist Summit talk, NetEase Games’ Chen Zhou focuses on rendering techniques for creating a physics-based world while keeping anime style feeling in game. A practical approach with deferred rendering pipeline, lighting, shadowing, post process and other notable features in 2D animations in runtime and assets creation are introduced. The concept of bringing advanced modern rendering techniques to toon shading based games can also be applied to other art styles. GDC

Cloud Save should be in EVERY game (full project source code) — Utilizing Cloud Save in your game enables effortless synchronization of player data to the cloud, eliminating the need for intricate backend configurations. This service is free of charge until your player base reaches a substantially large number. Tarodev

How to make PS1 Graphics in 4 minutes — In this video I go over from start to finish how to make PS1/PSX style graphics for your projects. I use Blender, GIMP, and Godot 4. All of them are free and open source. You can find textures from sites like textures.com, opengameart.org and texturelib.com binbun

MeshSync is Awesome …and Free! — MeshSync is a powerful, free and open source add-on for the Unity game engine, that gives you a live connection to your DCC tool of choice. Edit your model in Blender, Maya, Max, Modo and more and immediately see the results in your game engine. With the Blender version you can actually go both ways, seeing changes you made in Unity happen immediately in Blender! Gamefromscratch

LOD Your Lights — Performance Optimization | Unity Tutorial — One of the most popular optimization techniques is LOD, but rarely does anyone talk about LODing their lights. Lighting is one of the most expensive calculations in games today. In this tutorial, learn how you can apply the same concept of LOD to your lights to dramatically reduce the GPU load, boosting performance! LlamAcademy

Essential Maths For Beginner Gamedevs — Which Math is Useful? — There’s plenty of tutorials on learning maths for gamedev, but why and where is this maths actually useful? Here, I try to give examples of how and when different types of mathematics pop-up, and how they are actually used when making a game. I have added links throughout the video and below if you want to learn these topics in more detail, but hopefully this will make you aware of the different areas of maths used in gamedev! Madbook

We recreate the BTs from Death Stranding in Unity (Splines & SDFS) — Join us as we run through more interesting techniques with VFX Graph! We’ll move particles with splines to make a storm of fast food, we’ll move particles with SDFs (Sine Distance Fields) to make an environment effect that avoids obstacles and then we’ll combine those techniques to recreate the Beached Things from Death Stranding. Unity

Sims like building system in Unity 2022 — In this video I will be explaining how to create Sims like house building system in Unity. We will start with the basics of a grid placement system, talk about placing floor, walls and objects and talk a bit about the camera movement. Sunny Valley Studio

Run your Servers like a PRO! (Unity Game Server Hosting Multiplayer Tutorial) — Let’s learn how to handle Dedicated Servers with Unity Game Server Hosting (Multiplay) This is their tool where you can upload a server build to the cloud and then the system spawns servers and scales up or down depending on demand. Code Monkey

ISOMETRIC MOVEMENT & CAMERA IN UNITY — In this video you will be able to create an isometric player controller with a camera controller. You will have to use the new input system, and of course, the system will work on mobile. STROMPY

Assets

Game Design and AI Booke Bundle — Explore the world of game design. Discover insights from pro game designers, AI experts, and more in this book bundle from Taylor & Francis. Featuring books from the Game AI Pro series (edited by industry veteran Steve Rabin), in-depth breakdowns of video game classics, and tomes full of development advice, this library is an essential addition to any gaming and AI enthusiast’s digital bookshelf. Plus, your purchase helps support the charity of your choice! Humble Bundle Affiliate

Dynamic Lighting for Unity. — This package brings an old school lighting technique to Unity. It is inspired by Tim Sweeney’s lighting system in Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament (1996–1999). This system allows you to have an almost unlimited number of light sources in your scene, all with ray traced shadows. Unlike light baking techniques, where you can’t change any light source, or shadow mapping, where performance drops off after 4 lights or so, this technique allows real-time adjustments to all lights, such as flickering and changing colours, or even water refraction, among many other effects. Henry00IS Open Source

Unity GPU Based Occlusion Culling — It is an early prototype of custom occlusion culling system, for both static and dynamic objects. This asset is intended especially for situations, when you can’t use benefits from built-in Unity Occlusion Culling (loading custom prefabs from bundles or Streaming Assets), you use forward rendering and high-poly geometry etc. przemyslawzaworski Open Source

The Complete Pixel Art Online Course Mega Bundle — Learn to create a pixel art game. Get started building stylish 2D pixel art games with the help of these courses from Mammoth Interactive! This comprehensive curriculum covers key aspects of development, including creating characters and animations with Piskel, making maps and levels for a variety of genres, and building your projects using Unreal and Unity. Plus, your purchase will help support Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Humble Bundle Affiliate

UnityAudioRecorder — Multi-platform helper to record audio. Mukarillo Open Source

Scrmizu — Scrmizu is variable infinite scroll and extended UnityEngine.UI.ScrollRect for Unity UGUI. ToshikiImagawa Open Source

Proxima Inspector — Your game doesn’t have to be a black box. Proxima lets you inspect, debug, and control your game from any web browser. [Limited time 50% new release discount!] Virtual Maker Affiliate

CustomizationInspector — Customize Unity3D inspector by attribute(such as Button, ReadOnly, HideIf etc.) and serializable dictionary. Mr-sB Open Source

Unity Event Drawer Extension — Extend the UnityEventDrawer to display runtime calls in the inspector. mob-sakai Open Source

Spherical-Transform-Tool — Editor script tool that extends the Unity transform component to place element on spherical surfaces. ZiadRbai Open Source

Icons Creator 0.2.3 — This tool can create icons of any 3D object imported in Unity: prefabs, models, and objects on the opened scenes. Also you can make icons out of entire folders containing 3D objects. xyperine Open Source

Unmask For UGUI — Reverse mask for uGUI element in Unity. mob-sakai Open Source

Unity Bounding Volume Heirachy — Dynamic Unity 3d BVH — 3d Bounding Volume Hierarchy. rossborchers Open Source

Unity_Shader_Library_Zoroiscrying — This is a shader library used for unity shader coding, pointing to different shader effects found from various sources. Zoroiscrying Open Source

Unity Capsule Shadows — A work in progress solution for capsule shadows in Unity. frostbone25 Open Source

Lazy Jedi — The Lazy Jedi is a lite Unity Library of really cool Editor Tools and Runtime scripts that will spice up any project really fast. Lazy-Jedi Open Source

Folders for Unity Hierarchy — Specialized folder objects for Unity Hierarchy. xsduan Open Source

GentlyUI — A custom UI solution by Gentlymad Studios. It’s mainly purpose is to enable developers to create UI without having to learn Unity UI. This is achieved by UI Definitions written in C#. Also GentlyUI takes care to effectively pool and reuse UI elements. Additionally GentlyUI provides a set of custom UI elements that are written with best UX on PC in mind but won’t fit all usecases. Mobile and Console UI is currently unsupported. Gentlymad-Studios Open Source

FixMath — A fixed-point math library similar to unity.mathematics. Part of the Unity-X project, this repository welcomes any contribution. Unity-X Open Source

Flash Deals are back! — When each Flash Deal launches, the selected asset will be available at 70% off for the first eight hours, then move to 60% off for the next eight hours. After these initial discount periods, the asset will be available at 50% off for the remainder of the sale. Still lots of upcoming great deals including: Water Caustics Effect for URP v2, Post-Apo Pack, Pixel Sprite Effects Pack, Destructible 2D, Anime Stylized VFX, PolyArt Creatures Pack and more! Unity Affiliate

50% off Mocap Online — PUBLISHER OF THE WEEK. Get 50% off MoCap Online assets — now until March 23. Plus get RIFLE Basic — Mocap Animation Pack for FREE with coupon code MOCAPONLINE. Unity Affiliate

Spotlight

Earth of Oryn — Earth of Oryn is an indie city-builder/strategy game set in a medieval world filled with story and heart. Starting from nothing, you must shape your kingdom perfectly to your vision while managing the needs and wants of your people. [You can wishlist on Steam, visit their website and join their discord] Earth of Ory

You can subscribe to the free weekly newsletter on GameDevDigest.com

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.