This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

A variety of great content this week, plus a ton of deals on assets, books and tutorials to help you on your game dev journey. Enjoy!

How I created my game for the Ludum Dare 52 - In this blog post I will share how I experienced the jam and some of the technical details of the game I made.
arielcoppes.dev

1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond - In Age of Empires the time to complete each simulation step varies greatly: the rendering time changes if the user is watching units, scrolling, or sitting over unexplored terrain, and large paths or strategic planning by the AI made the game turn fluctuate fairly wildly. A few quick calculations show that passing even a small set of data about the units, and attempting to update it in real time would severely limit the number of units and objects interacting with the player. Just passing X and Y coordinates, status, action, facing and damage would limit us to 250 moving units in the game at the most. We wanted to devastate a Greek city with catapults, archers, and warriors on one side while it was being besieged from the sea with triremes. Clearly, another approach was needed.
gamedeveloper.com

Lazy and once-only C# async initialization - There are a couple of closely related optimizations that are often useful: lazy initialization, and "just once" initialization. These are conceptually pretty straightforward, although the details can get messy once multiple threads are involved. But what if the initialization work involves asynchronous operation?
endjin.com

Procedural Wrinkles - Something that we wanted to have since early in the production were wrinkle maps that would best be triggered automatically using tension maps on the deformed mesh and ideally these wrinkle maps would even be fully procedural and omni-directional.
studio.blender.org

Videos

5 UNIQUE Game Mechanics using CLOUD to make your game STAND OUT! - Here's 5 examples of interesting Game Mechanics you can build using the cloud!
Code Monkey

How I Made My Roguelike Game Replayable - Part 2 of our month long video game experiment. Today, we are going to work on adding replayability to our game. We will try to answer the question: Why do some games hook players into coming back day after day, season after season, while other games are dead days after release?
TJ

How to Create a Minimap in Unity | Unity tutorial - Creating a Minimap in Unity is easier than you think . in this video we create a minimap with a camera and raw image in unity And we also learn how to hide objects from camera by using culling mask .
BudGames

These 6 Game Devs Made 6 Games Using 1 Art Kit! | Synty Jam Collab - 6 Game Developers make 6 games using Unity Engine using a Synty Studios pack, the twist being they only have 48 hours to make their games!
Dan Pos - Game Dev Tutorials!

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

Transform Changes Debugger API - This tool will enable you to view and debug changes to position/rotation/scale on any transform done by any method/setter on a frame by frame basis.
It'll will work with code that executes changes via property setters (eg Transform.position = newValue) but also more complex methods (eg Transform.Rotate(1f, 230f, 15f, Space.Self)).
Changes can be originating from any assembly - not only your code but also 3rd party libraries or Unity assemblies.
handzlikchris 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

MonoBehaviourTree — Simple behaviour tree for Unity - This project is simple event driven behaviour tree based on Unity engine component system. This asset comes with minimal node library and tree visual editor.
Qriva Open Source

Decision-Tree-Package - An open source Unity package for creating Decision Trees with a visual editor. The package comes with some samples to help teach users how to use it and an action manager to handle executing the results of the decision tree.
KieranCoppins Open Source

Boomerang 2D - A Visual Building-Block approach to building Pixel Perfect 2D games in Unity without code.
Garmichael Open Source

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

UnityThreadQueue - It is Library that performs processing in the background in Unity. It is used the Thread and Queue system.
TakuKobayashi Open Source

RestClient for Unity - This HTTP/REST Client is based on Promises to avoid the Callback Hell and the Pyramid of doom working with Coroutines in Unity , example:
proyecto26 Open Source

WebRequest API - The WebRequest API provides an easy interface for accessing the HTTP pipeline by implementing a Request model that provides an easy, await-able and extendable way to fetch resources asynchronously across the network.
jeffreylanters Open Source

UltimateXR - UltimateXR is a professional-grade, free, open-source framework and toolkit for Unity. UltimateXR's goal is to simplify the development of virtual reality applications; from simulators to videogames and from simple prototypes to full AAA-scale projects.
VRMADA Open Source

Developer Console - Developer Console for Unity with easy integration to existing projects.
anarkila Open Source

extDebug - Debug Tools for Unity - extDebug are tools for easy development and testing of games on Unity. Supported platforms are PC, Mac and Linux / iOS / tvOS / Android / Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and other.
Iam1337 Open Source

Bookmark4Unity - A simple unity editor tool to provide basic bookmarking for scene objects, scene view camera positions, and project assets.
superkerokero Open Source

App Window Utility - This utility is for Unity to configure application window style. With this utility, you can make your application window transparent, frameless and more
sator-imaging Open Source

The Complete Unity Game Development Bundle - Build Games with Unity
Learn to create games with Unity! The world’s most popular game engine, Unity is behind hits like Pokémon GO, Genshin Impact, and Beat Saber. With this bundle of courses, you’ll build RPGs, FPS, racing, idle, survival, and strategy games, and master core skills like implementing procedural maps, multiplayer, VR, and cutscenes—no prior experience required.
Plus, you’ll support Lotus Outreach International with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

unity-vectorfield - Unity-vectorfield is vector field utility library, consisting of vector field generators on mesh and operators for them. It allows you to quick implementation of differential geometry algorithms on Unity, which instantly applicable to game programming, media art creation, or physical simulation.
komietty Open Source

Unity - PolyExtruder - Create custom meshes (2D polygons) in Unity3D, incl. functionality to extrude them (into 3D prisms).
nicoversity Open Source

Vloxy Engine - Performance oriented voxel engine for unity.
BLaZeKiLL Open Source

Water shader in Unity 3D - The goal of this project is to create as realistic water as possible using Shaders in Unity3D. Realistic water was achieved by implementing selected water effects.
leonjovanovic Open Source

HolisticMotionCapture - HolisticMotionCapture is an application that can capture the motion of a person with only a monocular color camera and move the VRM avatar's pose, face, and hands.
Pose, face and hands can be moved simultaneously or individually.
creativeIKEP 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

Machine Learning And Artificial Intelligence Book Bundle - Understand, build, and tap into AI. Curious about artificial intelligence? Need practical advice on working with machine learning? Pick up this library of ebooks and unlock a deeper understanding of today’s most talked-about technologies! Explore the realms of data science, neural networks, computer vision, and AI ethics, and find out how to use tools like Python and Spark to harness the power of machine learning for your own applications. Plus, your purchase helps support Prevent Cancer Foundation!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Farm Folks - Farm Folks is a Solarpunk open-world, co-op farming and life simulator game. Unleash your imagination, build, automate, and customize every detail of your farm. Grow crops, nurture animals, and befriend locals to cultivate the ultimate sim experience.

[You can wishlist it on Steam, back it on Kickstarter, and follow them on Twitter]
Crytivo

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