Game Dev Digest — Issue #165 - Game Design

Issue #165 - Game Design

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Game design and how to get better at it, plus a ton more. Enjoy!

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What Is Narrative Design? And How Do I Get Better At It? - Nathan Scott is a writer and game designer who specializes in narrative design. He has worked as a game designer on Hogwarts Legacy and Hard Light Vector. He is currently working on Diablo 4 at Blizzard Entertainment.
gamedesignskills.com

80 Level Digest: Great Books for Aspiring Game Designers - In today's list, we've collected over 10 books suitable for from-beginning-to-advanced game designers that can improve your knowledge and creativity.
80.lv

How to immerse your players through effective UI and game design - In an excerpt from the upcoming e-book, User interface design and implementation, veteran game designer Christo Nobbs examines the interplay between UI and game design.
Unity

ISOMETRIC PIXEL ART - Isometric pixel art is based on the isometric projection, which is a method for accurately ‘projecting’ 3D objects into fancy 2D. Unlike perspective drawing, there is no vanishing point in isometric projection. Furthermore, the 3 coordinate axis have equal foreshortening, eliminating the need to alter lengths based on the perceived distance from the viewer. This allows one to create 3D objects that accurately describe the complete form and all dimensions with efficiency. Traditionally, Isometric projection is used for technical drawings in engineering, architecture, and the assembly guide to your Lego set. However, these characteristics also make it a perfect style for game graphics. Marry it with pixel art, and something truly special happens. Let’s make some magic.
slynyrd.com

Unity Optimization Tips: Mobile & Desktop - Are you planning to optimize your game made with Unity and get the best performance? In this Complete Unity Optimization Guide, I will show you how to increase performance in Unity correctly, so your game will run fast & stable.
makaka.org

Press Kitty - Everything you need to create the ultimate indie game press kit! And, it's free!
gwinnell

Spherical Elevation - Adjusting Arbitrary Normals - Modify sphere radius with noise. Create analytical normals for a deformed sphere. Calculate normals without using tangents. This is the fifth tutorial in a series about pseudorandom surfaces. In it we will add support for deformed spherical surfaces, using noise to adjust the sphere radius.
catlikecoding.com

What’s new for Prefabs in 2022.2? - It’s been a while since the Scene Management team has shared an update on Prefabs. During the last few releases, and after fixing a large number of bugs you’ve reported (thank you!), we’ve made several improvements to the Prefab system. Let’s take a look at each improvement coming in 2022.2 – now available in beta – and how these updates can benefit you.
Unity

Unity 2023.1.0 Alpha 21 - Unity versions 2023.1.0 Alpha 21 and 2022.2.0 Beta 16 have been released.
Unity

Videos

Making Indie Games with Public Domain Content - In this 2022 Independent Games Summit session, award-winning game designer Chris Totten shows how to use public domain content for building unique visual and audio identities, making games from recognizable IP, or even promoting your game to new audiences.
GDC

Intro to Animation Rigging & Procedural Animation in Unity - Learn the fundamentals of the character animation pipeline, how animation rigging in Unity can help us to create procedural animations, and to break down Unity's hidden gem: the animation rigging package!
iHeartGameDev

Unity VFX Graph - Disintegrate and Dissolve Effect Tutorial - In this Unity tutorial we are going to create a Disintegrate Effect for a character! We are going to see how to do the Dissolve Shader and then use VFX Graph to spawn particles in the character! Enjoy!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

SOLID principles for Unity devs P1 - Introduction - In this tutorial I will show how we can apply SOLID principles for Unity game to make its code base more maintainable and ready for new features. We will take a prototype of a simple 2d game with a prototypical code that is very crammed into a single class and see how we can refactor it to comply with SOLID principles. I hope that by showing them on an example game project you will understand those principles more clearly.
Sunny Valley Studio

How to display and format big numbers. String formats, monospace and Text Mesh Pro - Idle games, business sims and highscores have one thing in common: They display a lot of crucial big numbers. Sometimes on their own, more often as part of a table, especially in simulation games. Using just any font will lead to headaches on how to format them in a way that is easy to understand at a glance, so let's have a look at how we can solve this problem.
Christina Creates Games

Unity Course - Complete Character Customization System - In this long course Unity Tutorial, we will create a robust customization system perfect for any game where you create your own character - RPGs, Social Games or Stardew Valley like games. I will walk you through the whole process, without skipping any steps. T
PitiIT

Escape room tutorial - In this tutorial we learn how to make a simple escape room using Unity's XR interaction toolkit.
Pdot Creations

Unity Scene Transition Animation Framework | Unity Tutorial - In this tutorial you'll learn how to implement a framework to manage animations between scenes. You'll learn how to use the SceneManager to asynchronously load scenes to get a lower amount of stutter when loading larger scenes. You'll also learn how to create ScriptableObject configurations for different animation transitions between the scenes to unlock limitless potential in your scene transition effects!
LlamAcademy

How to customize performance metrics in the Unity Profiler | Unite 2022 - Learn how to supercharge performance analysis in the Unity Profiler with your game-specific content. This session explains the workflow of adding new performance metrics and surfacing them in the Unity Profiler, and also spotlights the extensibility API in Unity 2021.
Unity

DOTS: Scaling MonoBehaviour and GameObjects | Unite 2022 - Learn more about working in a GameObject / MonoBehaviour space based on data-oriented design. This session walks you through how popular game Indus Battle Royale uses its DOTS-based GenericLOD to scale conventional GameObject-based systems for animation, rigs, assets, and visual effects.
Unity

Cold BREATH Particle Tutorial (Unity Particle Effects) - How to create a freezing or cold exhale breath in Unity, using the particle system. This is based on using the Unity Particle Pack which is available for free on the Unity Asset Store. We'll look at changing a smoke particle effect to what we want to create the breathing look.
SpeedTutor

Assets

Unity Cyber Week Sale - Unity’s Black Friday/Cyber Week sale continues to be incredibly popular! With more than 500 assets available at up to 50% off plus Daily Deals at up to 70% off!

Popular Assets include:

• Feel
• DOTween Pro
• A* Pathfinding Project Pro
• Odin Inspector and Serializer
• AllSky - 220+ Sky / Skybox Set
• Easy Save - The Complete Save Data & Serializer System
• All In 1 Vfx Toolkit
• Dynamic Bone
• Odin Validator
• Bakery - GPU Lightmapper Unity Affiliate

Learn To Create Game Art In Blender 2022 - Create amazing game art, assets & 3D models with these best-selling courses.
Learn 3D modeling and animation with Blender and teach yourself the digital art skills you need to make games today with this set of hands-on courses from GameDev.tv! Start with the Complete Blender Creator Course to build a foundation, and hone your technique with specialized courses in sculpting characters for games, building 3D worlds, painting textures, and much more.
Plus, your purchase will support SpecialEffect!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Open Brush - Tilt Brush Evolved - Open Brush is a free fork of Tilt Brush, a room-scale 3D-painting virtual-reality application available from Google, originally developed by Skillman & Hackett.
icosa-gallery Open Source

I've uploaded my full music library with 100+ songs to choose from ALL GENRES. You can FREELY use them in your games or anywhere else - This is my Holiday present for all of you! I've produced, composed, played, recorded, mixed, and mastered all of the songs. [Direct link to the library]
Sumppi95

I converted a massive library of mo-cap animations to .fbx which you can use freely with ALMOST no restrictions - Over 2,000 free 3d humanoid character animations that can be used commercially. [Direct link to the assets]
RancidMilkGames

MateAnimator - Animator++. Adding more features to the open sourced Animator from Unity.
ddionisio Open Source

RefinedAnimationProperty - Unity Editor Extension that refine animation property editor.
natsuneko-laboratory Open Source

Auto-Level - Free procural level generator based on WFC algorithm for unity.
The target of this package is to create a procural level generator that is controllable, easy to use, and fast to some extent by leveraging the power of the WFC. WFC is a powerful algorithm in terms of procural generation. However, it does not give the user control over the generation process.
Al-Asl Open Source

Glass system - The glass system is inspired by Receiver 2: On impact, a 2D pattern is clipped on the glass surface. this list of lines is then converted to a list of polygons (shards), finally the list of polygon is used to build the new meshes and game objects.
Tiitan Open Source

Deckard - Deckard is a Unity-based layout tool for card game prototyping, built for game designers who are already familiar with Unity's built-in Canvas components.
jonagill Open Source

UnityCipher - This is Cipher Libraries in Unity, include the AESCipher and RSACipher.
TakuKobayashi Open Source

TinyContainer - A simple service locator implementation for Unity.
JanikHelbig Open Source

Pivot Editor - Useful Editor Utility
rito15 Open Source

UnityMobileInput - Unity Mobile Input Plugin for iOS and Android (Unity UI compatible) You can use default InputField UI component on iOS and Android without additional field above keyboard.
mopsicus Open Source

Runtime Presets - Presets are a way to store a components values to an asset file that can be reapplied to other components either in the editor or by scripting.
Presets have one downside though: They are placed in the UnityEditor namespace and can therefore not be used in your compiled game. Loading presets at runtime is unfourtunately not possible. This plug-in intends solve this problem.
Runtime presets are an alternative to the Unity presets by storing components as prefabs that can then be reapplied at runtime. Using runtime presets is nearly identical to using the default Unity presets.
Moolt Open Source

Welcome to the Pixel Anti-Cheat! - This toolkit is designed to keep your game safe. Pixel Anticheat is a set of useful modules to prevent cheating and game memory intrusion.
TinyPlay Open Source

Bona Data Editor - Bona Data Editor is a Unity3D editor extension, made to simplify working with data.
bonahona Open Source

OpenGraphGUI - An open-source Editor GUI for use with URP ShaderGraphs in Unity, aiming to clean up the look of Material Properties while providing ease-of-use via tagging.
RobProductions Open Source

MGS.SkinnedMesh - Unity plugin for create skinned mesh in scene.
mogoson Open Source

Pbd2d - Unity package for Position Based Dynamics in two dimensions.
andywiecko Open Source

SpriteWrapper.cs - This component will mirror a sprite renderer and create a sprite wrapping effect at the edges of the screen similar to the game Asteroids. To use the component, add it to the same game object as the sprite renderer you want to mirror and it just works. Optionally, you can set the warp property to true and the game object will warp to the opposit…
devindazzle Open Source

DefaultTmpFont.cs - Localize the default TextMeshPro font.
karljj1 Open Source

Spotlight

Torii - Torii is an adventure/puzzle/indie game with an artistic approach. Full of surreal landscapes, strange creatures, and emotions. It's an introspective journey about the feelings that arise when facing the loss of a loved one.
[You can buy the game now on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Joaquín Castro

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