This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some game dev tips before we head into the eclipse. Enjoy!

2D Water Shader Breakdown - I wanted to try out some 2D reflections and ended up with this water shader. Sampling the noise textures with pixelated UVs really helped to make it fit with the pixel art style.
Cyanilux

Ray Marching: Menger Sponge Breakdown - There are two very popular methods to render 3D scenes. Rasterization has historically been the most popular method used for real-time graphics (ex: video games). In short, rasterization is a technique that projects 3D models, composed of 3D triangles, onto a 2D plane. Another popular method of rendering is ray tracing. This method has historically been used for rendering scenes that require a greater amount of realism and are not required to render in real-time (ex: cinematic visual effects).
connorahaskins.substack.com

Implementing Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path between two nodes using PriorityQueue in .NET 9 - In this post, we look at the Remove() method, which was added in .NET 9 (preview 1), and show how you can use it to implement Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path between two nodes.
andrewlock.net

Is The Ai Flood Here Yet? How Many Games Have Released In 2024 - Every year, I look at how many games have launched and how many have reached “Real Steam” (which I arbitrarily pick as having 1000+ reviews.) This year I want to track it throughout the year. Are we on track to have a blockbuster year of hit games? Is AI going to flood steam with thousands and thousands of generated art?
howtomarketagame.com

How the team behind Zelda made physics feel like magic - During a GDC 2024 talk, the developers on Tears of the Kingdom explained how they were able to blow players’ minds with the design philosophy of ‘multiplicative gameplay.’
theverge.com

Learn How To Make 3D Assets For Your Own Glitch Pixel Art Game - Winston Powell, the author of Of Love and Eternity, an upcoming Unity-based third-person horror adventure game with an extremely unique pixel art style, has presented an in-depth tutorial, covering the process of making game assets from start to finish.
80.lv

Custom SRP 2.5.0 - Structured Buffers - This time we modernize our RP by changing how we send the light and shadow data to the GPU. We used to do this via multiple arrays stored in constant buffers. We're going to replace those with structured buffers.
catlikecoding.com

Adding Weight To Your Animations - This is something I wish I knew more of when I started animating or even earlier in my career. Once I started applying STRAIGHTS and CRUVES to my weighted animations it really helped them shine and brought then to the next level. Of course there so many things that help with weight but this is a BIG one. Happy animating peeps!
Tyler Gogan

Videos

The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy - The original Gameboy was launched in 1989 and was received with mixed reviews. While its success is ingrained in our cultural memory now, when it was launched it was a technologically inferior product. The Gameboy was designed to be a cheap, low-powered, portable gaming system. It was limited in many ways. No backlight for the screen and incredibly low installed memory available for coding games. Review magazines of the time viewed these features as a negative, but these compromises in design were exactly why the Gameboy succeeded. This was a console for the masses.
Real Engineering

Building Runtime UI with UI Toolkit In Unity - In this video, we'll look at some of the new features added to the UI Toolkit package in Unity 2023.2 and how it's now at a point where it's much easier to work with when building UI for runtime.
Game Dev Guide

Dithered Transparency in Unity Shader Graph - Sometimes you want transparency, but you want the advantages of opaque rendering. That's where dithered transparency comes in: your objects appear transparent, but all the pixels are rendered opaque. Learn how games like Super Mario Odyssey implemented dithering with this tutorial!
Daniel Ilett

Unity UI Anchors explained - The Unity UI Anchors menu looks intimidating? I'll explain how to use it. We'll have a look at how anchors and pivot points determine where your game's UI elements sit on different screen resolutions, how those positions are calculated and how understanding them helps a lot in building a general UI layout as well as a modal window.
Christina Creates Games

How To Learn The Basics Of Game Market Research In Less Than 15 Minutes - After watching this video, you’re going to learn a simple but effective technique teaching you how much potential income your game might make in it’s market. You’ll also get a step-by-step action plan to see if it’s worth spending 6 months (or more) on your new game idea. As a bonus, you’ll also learn how to position your game if the genre you’ve picked is oversaturated.
How To Start A Game Company

How to make VIDEO GAME MUSIC for free (beginners' guide) - I hope this beginner's guide to composing VGM is helpful to you!
Matt Kenyon

The SECRET to Cinematic Light (VFX) - This video goes into detail on a few methods to achieve back light, as well as some implications about reflections and light and materials in general.
Compositing Academy

Mediator Pattern - Reduce Chaotic Dependencies - Fix your tightly coupled systems! Learn how the Mediator pattern can become a central point of references and information to reduce coupling between objects. Today we'll look at two examples - an chat room for AI Agents and upholding the Law of Demeter, and for good measure we'll include the Visitor and Builder programming patterns.
git-amend

Deep dive into the HDRP water system - Tutorial - Let’s dive into the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) water system! See the steps/workflows for creating realistic bodies of water in your Unity scenes.
Unity

Assets

$20 Asset Sale (Up to 75% Off) - Unlock savings of up to 75% on premium 3D assets, tools, animations, GUI elements, textures, and more to accelerate your game development process.

Some huge savings on great packs including: Mythical packaging of monsters, Sky Master ULTIMATE: Volumetric Skies, Clouds & Weather, Super Text Mesh, Infini GRASS GPU Vegetation, Fluid Flow 2 and much more!
Unity Affiliate

Master of C# and .NET Book Bundle - Mastery of C# and .NET awaits. Upgrade your approach to software development with this meticulously curated bundle of books from Packt, covering C# and a host of related topics. Kickstart your journey with C# Data Structures and Algorithms, written to help you understand these crucial concepts in computing. .NET MAUI Cross-Platform Application Development provides a comprehensive guide to building versatile applications across multiple platforms. A Developer's Guide to .NET Azure will empower you to harness the cloud, opening doors to scalable, high-performance applications with global reach. Pay what you want for all these and more—over 20 books in all!—and help support Trees, Water & People with your purchase!
IvanMurzak Affiliate

Unity-ImageLoader - Asynchronous image loading from remote or local destination. It has two layers of configurable cache system: RAM and Disk.
IvanMurzak Open Source

unity-flex-ui - Flexbox layout support for Unity UI using the Yoga layout engine
gilzoide Open Source

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

2D-Platformer-Hunter - A 2D Platformer Controller in Unity
ta-david-yu Open Source

Sketch - Processing-like API for Unity. Built on top of the Shapes vector graphics library
keenanwoodall Open Source

NativeTrees - Burst compatible Octree and Quadtree for Unity
bartofzo Open Source

Unity-URP-Underwater-Effects - Underwater effects for URP
Parrot222 Open Source

Anansi - Create simulation-driven visual novels in Unity.
ShiJbey Open Source

sprite-animations - A smooth and intuitive way to work with sprite sheets in Unity.
no-slopes Open Source

UnityTimeRewinder - Unity time rewind solution, that is easily customizable for any project.
SitronX Open Source

upscayl - Upscayl - Free and Open Source AI Image Upscaler for Linux, MacOS and Windows built with Linux-First philosophy.
upscayl Open Source

EditDistributionTools - A collection of C# scripts to ease the distribution of modifications of fbx files in Unity
HashEdits Open Source

unity-key-value-store - Key-Value Store save system interface and implementations for Unity
gilzoide Open Source

UnityScreenNavigator - Library for screen transitions, transition animations, transition history stacking, and screen lifecycle management in Unity's uGUI.
Haruma-K Open Source

procedural-generation-tool - procedural terrain generation tool on Unity
vyshnovka Open Source

Unity-AnimationUI - Usefull Unity tool for animating UI with just drag and drop
DhafinFawwaz Open Source

APFrameworkUI - A Text Mesh Pro based text only UI system for Unity
dklassic Open Source

Domain-Specific Personas - Create, interact with, and deploy AI personas with scoped knowledge and distinct personalities. Run models on your own machine. No accounts or API keys required.
Ragdoll Studio

50% off Skril Studio - Publisher Sale - Skril Studio is currently a one-man studio. This self-taught sound designer, music producer, C# programmer, and 3D modeler is most known for his “Realistic Engine Sounds 2” asset, available in three editions. He also sells exclusive add-on sound packs that come with prefabs made for RES2. PLUS, get UI SFX Mega Pack for FREE with code SKRILSTUDIO
assetstore.unity.com Affiliate

Creator Boombox - Loopable Royalty Free Songs For An Upgraded Experience - A library of loopable royalty-free tunes. Does your project need a soundtrack? Jump on this bundle of royalty-free music and get 20 track packs representing a spectrum of genres, ready to add a new dimension to your creation! Whether you’re looking for chill coffee shop vibes, ambient lo-fi beats, hard-driving EDM, or anything in between, you’ll find the sound that your project needs. A total of 12 hours worth of songs. Pay what you want for a music library that will keep you stocked with tunes for years to come and help support Alzheimer’s Research UK with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Turn Any 2D Image Into 3D Model In One Click With This Blender Add-On - TraceGenius Pro is a Blender add-on that takes the complexity out of 2D to 3D conversion, offering an extremely user-friendly experience with powerful tools and advanced algorithms for extracting shapes, adjusting details, and achieving excellent mesh quality.
80.lv

UnityMemorySnapshotThing - Tool to work with unity memory snapshots
SamboyCoding Open Source

Code Like A Pro 2024 Book Bundle - Code like a pro! Learning how to write games, web apps, and cool artificial intelligence programs is fun, and it's also an awesome way to make a living! If you want to succeed, you need to code like a pro. We've teamed up with Manning Publications for this incredible bundle of 20 AWESOME books that will help take your programming skills to the next level.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

GameMasters Toolkit: Assets & Tutorials Bundle - Craft worlds & master techniques
Get the skills and building blocks you need to create stunning game assets with this bundle from Leartes Studios. You’ll get a host of asset packs ready to plug into your Unity and Unreal projects, ranging from interior and exterior environments, to props and icons and more. Also included are a selection of tutorials produced by Leartes and their partners, created to skill you up on essential tools and techniques like Lumen, Unreal’s global illumination and reflections system.
Pay what you want for this bundle, valued at nearly $4,000, and help support Direct Relief with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Game Dev Toolbox - Master Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender And More - Software Bundle - Become a versatile game developer
Looking to become a game developer? This bundle of video courses will serve as your foundation. Learn to create stunning in-game assets with Blender, ranging from stylized character models to detailed environments—and acquire the skills required to bring those creations to life in Unreal Engine. Master programming in C#, the versatile programming language that will help you work in Unity, create apps and games for Android, and much more.
Pay what you want for over 20 courses—a value of over $2,500—and help support charity Alzheimer's Research UK!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Tiny Tires - Race around coffee cups and jump off notepads in Tiny Tires - a simple, fast-paced miniature racing game. A throwback to classic racing games, featuring a top-down perspective making it easy to keep an eye on any opponents trying to get one up on you.

[You can wishlist it on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Jon Kristinsson

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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