This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Here's to another year. Enjoy!

Swapping Rigged Hair to an Existing Armature - We’re going to talk about hair today! This tutorial is a bit of a follow-up to my Adding Parts to a Rigged Character guide. Both are about moving parts from one character rig to another, but the key difference here is that in this tutorial, we're going to use parts that are weighted to unique armature bones. Namely: Hairstyles.
stellargameassets.com

Analyzing the top-grossing Steam games of 2021 - There’s a lot of things to delve into, starting with Steam’s extremely useful listing of the top games of 2021 from a gross revenue perspective.
gamedeveloper.com

What's new for 2D creators in Unity 2021.2 - When it comes to 2D, more specifically, this release focuses on smoother workflows for PSD imports and the creation of 2D characters, enhanced performance and extensibility for Tilemap and 2D Physics, as well as new functionalities for 2D Graphics to refine the rendering of beautiful and highly performant 2D experiences.
Unity

Unity Raycast Commands: A New Era - In this post, you will learn how to stop your current raycasts from stealing performance and upgrade them to the new era of Unity raycast commands that finally scale. [Don't miss Ruben's other recent posts: The "KISS" Transaction Pattern, and Shader Variant Stripping — Get Rid of That Performance Waste! as well]
The Gamedev Guru

Getting Feedback - Getting feedback is one of the skills that you'll hone and sharpen continuously throughout your career. Here are five basic tips that might help you process and gather feedback.
ltpf.ramiismail.com

Practical tips on technical Game Design Documentation (Part 1) - Introduction to a 3-part serie about writing Game Design Documentation. In this part, I present high-level rules that shape my mindset, to get readers on the same page for the next, more practical parts about Google Docs and Sheets. [part 2, and part 3]
gamedeveloper.com

Yet Another Roguelike Tutorial - [Written in Python, but the lessons can apply to any engine. If you are interested in more, check out the Hacker News thread, and the one on Simple Dungeon Map Generation]
rogueliketutorials.com

Setting up Unity Performance Testing package and Performance Benchmark Reporter - I want to list the steps I did to have it running and especially how to get results from performance tests after run on a real device, because obviously we don’t want to measure performance of the game only inside the editor.
gamedev.center

VFX in Unity: Getting Started - Learn how to create your own custom visual effects using Unity’s built-in Particle System.
raywenderlich.com

The Unity Shader Bible - The definitive book to learn shaders in Unity. Introduction to the shader programming language. Compute shader, ray tracing and sphere tracing. Lighting, shadow and surface.
learn.jettelly.com

Finding Your Home in Game Graphics Programming - There really wasn't (as one person put it) a one-size-fits-all solution for learning graphics anymore. Some might look at that and say "well, there never was one before either" and they'd be right, but the gaps have widened in recent years. Let's talk about that.
alextardif.com

BitArrayX and LinearHashMapX - Truthfully, I’m out of topics to write about so here’s some more DOTS utilities that we’ve written that you can use. Both of these can be used inside an IComponentData struct and are Burst compatible.
Coffee Brain Games

Videos

I Made Pokemon Red & Blue but its 3D - I Made Pokemon Red & Blue but its 3D. . . After making some games like Super Mario Bros but its 3D, and The Legend Of Zelda but its 3D, I thought this time around I would go even bigger and try to remake the original Pokemon Red & Blue but in 3D.
CodyCantEatThis

Impossible Geometry with Stencil Shaders in Unity URP - Games like Antichamber feature impossible geometry where multiple objects seemingly inhabit the same physical space, but only appear when viewed from certain angles. We can recreate the effect in Unity using stencil shaders and Universal Render Pipeline's special Renderer Features functionality!
Daniel Ilett

Unity VFX Graph - Ground Slash Tutorial - In this Unity tutorial we are going to create a Ground Slash effect! We will use Blender, Krita and the amazing Visual Effect Graph tool from Unity! Complex, but you'll learn some great techniques! Hope you guys like it!
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

Sprite Shadows in Unity - Cast and receive shadows using a SpriteRenderer - Casting shadows from your sprites is as simple as pie. For some reason, Unity hides this by default, but I'm here to abuse the system and show you how to turn it on.
Tarodev

How to use Cinemachine in Unity: Virtual Cameras Explained - Learn how to use Cinemachine Virtual Cameras in Unity to capture a cinematic feel for your games!
iHeartGameDev

How to Make a 2D Character Creator in Unity - Although it only has 4 body parts, each with only 2 options, this 2D character creator can be expanded to include a virtually infinite number of body parts and options to fit your own Unity games. The player can select any combination they choose, then click play to begin their adventure. Also, in the overworld scene, there's a mini version of the character creator to show how all animations can be updated in real time. This might be useful to anyone working on an inventory system with equipable armor or items.
tutmo

How to Make a Multiplayer Game in Unity | Connecting Clients to a Server - Part 1 - In this first part of my Unity multiplayer tutorial series using RiptideNetworking, we set up a connection between a server and a client.
Tom Weiland

Holographic Card Shader Graph : Blender + Unity 2021 Tutorial - In this video, we will show how to create a holographic shader graph for cards.
Binary Lunar

Assets

New Year Sale 50% off - Over 8,000 assets are available at up to 50% off in the Asset Store. Sale ends this Tuesday!

Plus, use coupon code HELLO2022 for an additional 5% off the sale price on orders over $150
Unity Affiliate

Stylised Character Controller - A stylised physics based character controller made in Unity 3D.
joebinns Open Source

Pokemon Unity by IIcolour Spectrum - A framework to build Pokémon RPG games.
PokemonUnity Open Source

Grid Game Groundwork for Unity - A Unity project & level editor for making grid-based/block-pushing/Sokoban-like games.
mytoboggan Open Source

Unified Renderer - Simple Unity plugin that simplifies and promotes working with MaterialPropertyBlock.
Luka Kldiashvili Open Source

2D Shape Editor for Unity. - The 2D Shape Editor is a versatile tool to create complex 3D meshes out of 2D shapes. With this program you can easily create a design cross-section in a two-dimensional view and then expand it to a 3D mesh.
Henry00IS Open Source

Polyhydra - A toolkit for the procedural generation of geometric forms in Unity.
IxxyXR Open Source

UnityShaderStripper - Modular editor utilities for shader stripping to drastically improve Unity build times.
SixWays Open Source

RightStatsMonitor - Useful tool for displaying FPS with high precision. Very lightweight and fast. GC-free.
inc8877 Open Source

Unity Mesh Importer - Unity Mesh Importer is a utility that applies modifiers to its meshes at the time of importing a 3d model.
malyawka Open Source

Unity Addressable Importer - A simple rule-based addressable asset importer. The importer marks assets as addressable, by applying to files having a path matching the rule pattern.
favoyang Open Source

The cscore Library - cscore is a minimal-footprint library providing commonly used helpers & patterns for your C# projects. It can be used in both pure C# and Unity projects.
cs-util-com Open Source

Unity Rect Extensions - Fluent API for Unity Rect layouting for building maintainable editor UI.
nitreo Open Source

Footnote Utilities - A collection of common and useful Unity C# scripts to help you create projects quicker.
alexjhetherington Open Source

Debug Draw API for Unity - DbgDraw is an API that provides the ability to render various 2D and 3D shapes for visual debugging purposes. It's similar to Unity's Gizmos and Handles API's.
pschraut Open Source

Unity-Runtime-Animation-Recorder - This project can make you recording animations in runtime with Unity, and can save into .anim or Maya .ma format.
newyellow Open Source

Animation Texture Baker for Unity - sugi-cho
Open Source
Unity-Technologies Open Source

Animation Instancing - As developers, we’re always aware of performance, both in terms of CPU and GPU. Maintaining good performance gets more challenging as scenes get larger and more complex, especially as we add more and more characters.
Unity-Technologies Open Source

AnimeTask - Task Animation Library for Unity Rx Version!
kyubuns Open Source

MIDI Animation Track for Unity Timeline - MIDI Animation Track is a custom timeline/playables package that provides functionality to control object properties based on sequence data contained in a standard MIDI file (.mid file). This allows you to create musically synchronized animation using a DAW (digital audio workstation) that is easy to manage accurately synchronized timings compared to other non-musical timeline editors like Unity's one.
keijiro Open Source

#NVJOB Dynamic Sky v2.5.1. Free Unity Asset. - Simple and fast sky shaders. The asset includes two shaders and a simple script. For the shader to work properly, a dome model with prepared UV is required. [check out more by nvjob including this water shader]
nvjob Open Source

Welcome to Implementation Selector - Welcome to Implementation Selector: a small Unity editor extension that allows you to automatically select an interface/base class's implementations directly on the editor. This is very useful for rapdily create configuration files for your applications.
Juce-Assets Open Source

Boids-2D - My simple, tiny, tidy take on the classical Boids algorithm by Craig Reynolds. [also, one by nvjob]
Christian Rizov Open Source

Moon and Earth Material Samples for Unity - his repository contains the following assets:
keijiro Open Source

Unity Planet Rendering - A full scale planetary rendering in Unity 3D. Using precomputed atmospheric scattering as an image effect. Generating large planets with GPU noise, using compute shaders.
simeonradivoev Open Source

Streaming Map Demo - A Saab Dynamics demo of the Streaming Binary Data Architecture
This is a generic streaming API for 3D engines (Unity,Unreal...) that allows fast streaming updates of huge 3D datasets located in cloud, from disc or procedural.
ToolTech Open Source

URP-ScreenSpaceCavity - Blender Cavity Effect for Unity.
malyawka Open Source

Compute Stochastic Screen Space Reflections - Compute Stochastic Screen Space Reflections for Unity post processing. Utilizing shared memory for performance.
simeonradivoev Open Source

Minimal Compute Shader Examples - Minimal test scenes contains compute shaders, compute buffers etc Playing with the transport between CPU GPU.
cinight Open Source

NatML - NatML allows developers to integrate machine learning into their Unity applications in under five lines of code with zero infrastructure. NatML completely removes the need to have any experience with machine learning in order to take advantage of the features it can provide.
natsuite Open Source

Spotlight

Shredders - As described by Polygon.com: "2021’s indie skateboarding game craze continues into the new year, except with a slight twist: This game features snowboarding instead. Shredders is being developed by a Belgian and Swedish studio called FoamPunch. The team posted a video showing off a quick shot of a trick where the snowboarder rides up a ramp and flies through a hole in a wall. The game looks smooth as ... ice, and like a chill, laid-back time. According to the devs, Shredders will launch sometime in 2022, first on Xbox Series X, where it will also be available on Xbox Game Pass."
[You can follow them on Twitter]
FoamPunch

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