This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Missed last week, but back with a big issue. Enjoy!

Recreating Death Stranding Odradek Terrain Scanner in Unity - Sichen Liu explained how they recreated the Odradek Terrain Scanner effect from Death Stranding using Unity and showed how the visual components and icons were set up.
80.lv

Now available: Sponza scene remaster for Unity devs - In this blog, I’ll walk you through some updates I’ve made to the environment to help Unity developers realize its full potential.
Unity

Extended Q&A: Optimizing memory and build size with Addressables - In February, as part of my role as a senior software development consultant for Unity Accelerate Solutions, I led a technical webinar about the Addressables Asset System. During the live session, I demonstrated various profiling tools that you can use to optimize a project’s runtime memory and build size. The webinar ended with a Q&A, and our team received more questions than we had time to answer.
Unity

Solid Principles in C# - In this blog post, we'll explore each of the five SOLID principles and how they can be applied using C# language to create high-quality code.
harshmatharu.com

A quick tour of dictionaries in C# - Dictionaries in C# are one of the more useful data structures you can use to store and retrieve data quickly and most programming languages have some form of dictionary built into them. However, there are a lot more versions of dictionary in C# and I haven't an article bringing them all together to discuss where you'd use one over the other, so hopefully this might help you out.
Jack Lewis

Here's how I made pretty water for my game - the instructions are godot specific, but the code itself is just openGL so should work in other engines too
Preethi Vaidyanathan

A Cool Method for Slicing Meshes in Unity - Mirza Beig showed how to cut any mesh with just two lines of code.
80.lv

Kingdom Developer on Creating Pixel Environments - Thomas van den Berg, the creator of Kingdom, told us about their first project, the early development of Cloud Gardens, and using PixPaint to make 3D pixel art.
80.lv

Videos

Tenacious D - Video Games (Official Video) - Official for "Video Games" by Tenacious D.

[Hey, we don't always have to be learning, just have some fun this week!]
Tenacious D

Efficient and impactful lighting with Adaptive Probe Volumes | Unity at GDC 2023 - This session will showcase the advantages of adaptive probe volumes over legacy light probes (automated placement, per-pixel lighting, reflection probe normalization, and lighting scenarios). How to set up the system and how to fix light leaking (tools for debugging and tuning APV) with multiple scene examples.
Unity

Start working with GUI Kits in Unity ? Great tools for UI prototyping - Discover how to create stunning game UI designs with minimal effort using UI Kits in Unity! Say goodbye to boxy, plain UI prototypes and elevate your game's overall look without compromising gameplay. In this video, we'll explore the benefits of using UI Kits for game UI design and prototyping, and how to select the perfect pack for your needs.
Christina Creates Games

CUTSCENES in Unity using Timeline - If you ever wondered how to create Cutscenes in Unity, you can get started right away using Unity's built in Timeline tool.
BMo

How Nintendo Solved Zelda's Open World Problem - To mark the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, let's look back at the making of Breath of the Wild's open world.
Game Maker's Toolkit

No-Budget DIY Marketing for Indie Games - In this 2023 Independent Games Summit talk, Michelle Lega, Senior Producer at Armor Games, provides a framework for developing a marketing and PR outreach plan that only takes an hour of work a day. By the end of the presentation, attendees will have the knowledge to develop their own no-budget marketing plan that covers press outreach, social media, and more, with a minimal time commitment.
GDC

Quake's PVS: A hidden gem of rendering optimization - A look at how Quake uses portal graphs to pre-calculate visibility information.
Matt's Ramblings

The Golden Rule of Game Promotion: No One Cares About Your Game - In this GDC 2023, talk, the "no one cares about your game" mindset gets explained and shows how this simple marketing philosophy can help teams laser focus their social media posts, keep their trailers to-the-point, write better emails, and shape a wider PR campaign mindset.
GDC

Becoming a Unity VFX Artist -08 - Lightning - Let's create some lightning bolts
Brandon Garman

Simulating Chladni Plates in Unity | Useless Game Dev - Dive with me into the world of Chladni plates and the weird sand pattern they create. Will my GPU catch on fire? There’s only one way to know!
Useless Game Dev

Create a Reusable Health System (Unity Tutorial | 2D Top Down Shooter) - In this Unity tutorial we're going to look at how to create a reusable health system, that allows the Player to take damage from the enemies.
Ketra Games

Spectacular Blood VFX in Unity! || PBR Shader Graph + Particle System - I take blood showers every morning and I highly recommend you to do the same! In this video you will learn how to create your own spectacular blood fountain with the use of PBR Shader graph and particle system. No textures required (beside the default Unity particle sprite as a mask), everything is done proceduraly. Don't forget to have fun!
Skinner Space

Wall painting shader in Unity 2021 - Many simulation games offer a wall or object painting mechanic as a way to customize your in game house.
Sunny Valley Studio

Substance Days 2023 at GDC: "THE MATERIAL ART OF THE LAST OF US PART I" - This session presented by Jonathan Benainous and Jared Sobotta focuses heavily on the material art and creation for The Last of Us: Part I. Jonathan and Jared will revisit the post-pandemic world of The Last of Us and talk through the recreation for the PlayStation 5. They will discuss the texture art pipeline at Naughty Dog, providing insight on the team’s dynamic for success. Jonathan will shed light on the challenges of man-made, architectural material creation for the Boston Capitol Building as well as the creation of procedural generators with Substance 3D Designer to speed up the team’s process and author a large amount of materials. Jared will focus on natural, organic art and the marriage of Substance 3D Designer and organic sculpting for Tommy’s Dam. Both artists will share their workflows and artistic choices utilizing Adobe Substance 3D Designer to create "The Material Art of The Last of Us Part I".
Adobe Substance 3D

10 splendid video game documentaries you can watch right now - From retro high score champions to esports to the struggles of game development, here are 10 feature-length video game documentaries to suit all tastes.
whynowgaming.com

VFX Graph: Six-way lighting workflow | Unity at GDC 2023 - Want to create great-looking smoke effects? In Unity 2022.2, VFX Graph introduced the six-way lighting output and DCC tools that you can use to create compatible textures so you can create volumetric-looking smoke under any lighting conditions. In this hands-on session, a VFX Graph senior technical artist walks you through the process of creating six-way lighting textures and using them in VFX Graph.
Unity

An overview of the new HDRP Water System | Unity at GDC 2023 - In this session, you will get a glimpse of the new Water System, which is fully integrated into HDRP. Engineers will show you how it works under the hood and what you can achieve in terms of art direction, gameplay, and performance.
Unity

Efficient and impactful lighting with Adaptive Probe Volumes | Unity at GDC 2023 - This session will showcase the advantages of adaptive probe volumes over legacy light probes (automated placement, per-pixel lighting, reflection probe normalization, and lighting scenarios). How to set up the system and how to fix light leaking (tools for debugging and tuning APV) with multiple scene examples.
Unity

Assets

Unity Spring Sale - This is the perfect opportunity for users to get the assets and tools on their wishlist to take their work to the next level. More than 500 of our most popular assets will be available at 50% off for the duration of the sale and we will also have a series of Flash Deals on select assets at up to 70% off for a limited time.

Some highlights of the assets on sale: Magica Cloth 2, A* Pathfinding Project Pro, Mesh Baker, TopDown Engine, UMotion Pro Animation Editor, Text Animator For Unity, Rayfire For Unity, plus a lot more.

Plus, don't forget the Flash Deals update daily, with new assets going on sale for 70% off!
Unity Affiliate

Smart Addresser: Automate Addressing, Labeling, and Version Control for Addressables - Automate Addressing, Labeling, and Version Control for Unity's Addressable Asset System.
CyberAgentGameEntertainment Open Source

Welcome to Vaser! - Vaser is a powerful high performance event based network engine library for C# .Net. It is possible to start multiple servers in one program and use the same network code for all servers. In the network communication are all strings are omitted, instead it is based on a unique binary identifier, which the CPU and memory relieves massively.
Meoqan Open Source

SuperUnityBuild - A powerful automation tool for quickly and easily generating builds with Unity.
superunitybuild Open Source

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

Master Server Toolkit - This is an independent, free and at the same time powerful solution to many of the problems you face when developing online multiplayer games and applications.
aevien Open Source

Unity Math Reference - Math reference for games and more. Visualized in Unity3D.
zezba9000 Open Source

Fusion - Unity Physics on GPU - Fusion is built in the spirit of enabling developers to have "physics" in their game without sacrificing performance, or at least, not too much performance. We choose to base our simulation on Position-Based-Dynamics, which already gives good performances when running on CPU and pretty easy to parallelize.
Ninjajie Open Source

Palette Pro - Palette Pro is a powerful color palette generator that offers a range of tools for creating and exploring color palettes. With just a few clicks, you can generate randomized color combinations and save them as beautifully crafted 320x60 PNG grids in the palette/ folder.
JAMadison Open Source

com.bananaparty.behaviortree - Unity package. Fully cross-platform Behavior Tree featuring support for deterministic simulation and prediction-rollback netcode.
forcepusher Open Source

Trove - Collection of tools for Unity DOTS
Philippe St-Amand Open Source

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

Colorlink - An editor tool that allows to quickly swap the entire color palette of the game. Works with materials, components, prefabs and assets, by directly linking serialized properties and material properties to the palette — no extra components needed! The tool is editor only and can't be used in builds.
letharqic Open Source

Vgo - VGO is a 3D data format for Unity that can store Mesh, Texture, Material, Collider, Rigidbody, Cloth and Particle information.
izayoijiichan Open Source

Dark Config - DarkConfig is a configuration library for games which supports fast and expressive iteration
SpryFox Open Source

Simple RTS Camera - Simple camera controller for real-time strategy games, made in Unity C#.
mrgarcialuigi Open Source

Flower - With Flower, you can not only setup your dialogs but also trigger functions (like showing images, playing audios, executing customized C#...) by plain text.
emptygamer Open Source

UITK Editor Aid - This package contains UI Toolkit elements and utilities for custom Editor interfaces in Unity.
OscarAbraham Open Source

Flexi - Ability System Framework for Unity - Flexi is an ability system framework for Unity.
PhysaliaStudio Open Source

Simple Blackboard - Simple Blackboard for Unity is a flexible runtime data container that can contain any count of properties of any type. The properties can be accessed with property names.
The main advantage of Simple Blackboard is that it allocates as little as possible. Also, it has good enough performance and supports derivation.
ZorPastaman Open Source

Easy npcs - Easy NPCs is an easy-to-use asset that helps you create NPCs for your project.
Lyue tech Affiliate

Unity-Serialized Dictionary - Serialize Dictionary and see them visually in inspector
Prastiwar Open Source

Custom Nav Mesh - Alternative to Unity's NavMesh system where the agents avoid the other non-moving agents in their pathing. It uses the official navigation system, but you have to use its components instead. Compatible with NavMeshComponents.
jadvrodrigues Open Source

Animation Library - The Animation Library package contains assets and scripts for animating Unity objects. Animation behaviors include Blink, FollowPath, Move, Orbit, Rotate, Scale, SmoothFollow, SmoothLookAt, and more. The package also contains several animation-related data structures and predefined avatar masks.
zigurous Open Source

Eflatun.SceneReference - Scene References for Runtime and Editor. Strongly typed, robust, and reliable. Provides GUID, Path, Build Index, and Name.
starikcetin Open Source

Update Manager - Simple to use Update Manager pattern for Unity + Jobified Update for MonoBehaviours and pure C# classes alike. Using these may improve your game's CPU usage if there are thousands of objects updating every frame.
gilzoide Open Source

UIMask - Reverse Mask of Unity "Mask" component.
dreamcodestudio Open Source

Audio Manager - Audio Manager is a FREE audio/sound management library for Unity with options to play clips & background music for any game.
CarterGames Open Source

HexagonalUI - Unity currently does not offer a built-in layout group for creating stackings of hexagonal elements, such as those sometimes used for skill grids. This package aims to fill that gap by providing a hexagonal layout group that will page UI elements into a grid.
mpewsey Open Source

AuraTween - A lightweight, simple, and high performance tweening library for Unity.
I wanted a modern, simple, small, performant, expandable, and mostly unopinionated library to perform tweening actions in Unity.
Auros Open Source

Eldamar Studio Ultimate Unity Assets Bundle - Amazing assets for Unity game devs. Turn your creative vision into gaming reality with the help of these assets from Eldamar Studio! Curated for Unity developers, this bundle features stylish low-poly environments, high-quality materials packs, visual effects, ready-to-go weapons, and lots more for a wide range of genres and styles. Get a versatile game creators’ variety pack, and help support Save the Children with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Tape to Tape - Tape to Tape is a roguelite hockey game where every choice matters on your journey to build the best hockey team. Choose your path, hire unique players, discover synergies between them, pick unique abilities, bribe the referees or visit the Blademaster on your way to restore hockey's former glory.

[You can get it on Steam, and follow them on Twitter]
Excellent Rectangle

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