This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Some great practical advice on working efficiently. Also marketing tips, and more great content. Enjoy!

Let’s write a video game from scratch like it’s 1987 - I thought it would be fun to make with the same principles a full-fledged GUI application: the cult video game Minesweeper. Will it be hundred of megabytes when we finish? How much work is it really? Can a hobbyist make this in a few hours?
gaultier.github.io

Serialization for C# Games - Serialization is incredibly important to games, and often painfully difficult to implement well. Unless you just like building serializers, you may find yourself putting off developing a save/load system, especially if you need more than just a simple "what level am I on?" mechanism.
chickensoft.games

5 features I include in all my games - Every single game I make has a few features in common. I add these features to make my games faster to work on and easier to ship.
valadria.com

How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly - Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect.
learnhowtolearn.org

Games Marketing on Easy Mode, Hard Mode, and the Dark Valley Between - I spend a lot of time looking for marketing ideas worth stealing. This is what a lot of marketing is, right? You pay attention to what the herd is doing, and if you see somebody breaking away from the pack and doing something interesting, you go take a look. What do they know that I don't?
pushtotalk.gg

Exponentially Better Rotations - If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
thenumb.at

Need to avoid real transparency? Try dithering! - With just a handful of nodes you can create the effect to fake transparency or stylize the look of your project. Its also faster than real transparency
Binary Impact @BinaryImpactG

Where Did You Go, Ms. Pac-Man? - Today I’m telling a story about Ms. Pac-Man, and while it mentions her unorthodox debut to the world of video games and her apparent disappearance in 2022, this is more about what made her unique as a female video game protagonist. In fact, she was (is?) so different that Namco may have been trying to invent a replacement for her almost from the beginning.
thrillingtalesofoldvideogames.com

Videos

Exploring the AI of Dark Souls | AI and Games #75 - Dark Souls is known for its ruthless and relentless enemy AI characters. It's time to find out how they really work, and how they continue to surprise players over a decade later.
AI and Games

All Game Trailers Are Not Created Equal - Video game trailers are unique in the entertainment landscape in terms of production, content, and especially presentation. In this GDC 2024 session, Adrien Marie, Brand Manager at Dotemu, shares through multiple examples his insights on game trailers, their structures, formats, goals and how the way they are presented can and must change your way to build them.
GDC

Create a SEQUENCE System for a list of Commands (Unity Tutorial) - In this easy tutorial, I'll show you how to setup a simple Sequence system that will allow you to create ScriptableObjects to use as "commands" that will run, 1 after the other until complete.
Sasquatch B Studios

How to PREDICT Sales for your game (ACCURATELY!) - Learning how to ACCURATELY estimate sales for your game is a really crucial part of the pre-production process, if you're trying to find financial success with your games.
Code Monkey

Streamline Your Game - Without Being a Memory EXPERT! - Find out how to use Unity's new Memory Profiler to find key areas for optimization and detect memory problems. Users without in-depth knowledge of memory can still effectively optimize games efficiently. This new tool gives you the ability to take and compare snapshots of your memory footprint at any point in your game and we're going to add functionality to take Memory snapshots programmatically.
git-amend

Game Design Documents - A Comprehensive Guide - This is a video many of you have been requesting for some time. I explain what a Game Design Document is, when to use it, and why. I then go over several examples in detail, outlining major elements and the reasoning behind them, to show you what professional docs look like, including the GDD for one of our own titles - The Alchemask.
Serket Studios

Assets

Unity and Unreal Engine Mega Bundle - Limitless creation for Unity & Unreal
__

The $35 Asset sale - Get trending 3D, GUI, environments, and scripting assets for only $35 and save up to 65%. Plus, get an extra 10% off on orders over $60 with the code JUNE10OFF.
Unity Affiliate

MeshAnything - From anything to mesh like human artists
buaacyw Open Source

UnityFingerCamera - Finger Camera provides a small preview window of the grabbed object below your finger on mobile devices. Easily customizable with included examples.
SitronX Open Source

UGUIVertexEffect - UGUIVertexEffect is a set of components for Unity UGUI that adds cool effects to your UI!
markeahogan Open Source

Retarget Pro (50% Off New Release) - For years it was impossible until now - Retarget Pro is the ultimate solution for any Generic character in Unity. It does not have the limitations of the Humanoid system and offers a lightweight and streamlined approach to animation retargeting.
KINEMATION Affiliate

AnimationPlayer - An animation player for Unity, to replace the Animator/AnimatorController.
Baste-RainGames Open Source

AnimExpress - Lightweight Unity Utility to quickly setup 2D sprite-sheet animations
sgaumin Open Source

TinkStateSharp - Handle those pesky states, now in C#
nadako Open Source

CoroutineEx - An abstraction over Unity coroutines that behaves similarly to Tasks in C#.
s-rayleigh Open Source

Goap - A multi-threaded GOAP system for Unity
crashkonijn Open Source

instant-games-bridge-unity - One SDK for cross-platform publishing HTML5 games.
instant-games-bridge Open Source

lazy-sprite-extractor - Sprite Extractor Tool For Unity.
Lazy-Jedi Open Source

VR-Notifications - Simple Notification System for VR.
Volorf Open Source

SimpleIconCreator - Unity Editor Tool for Simple Icon Creation
Battledrake Open Source

Tri-Inspector - Free inspector attributes for Unity [Custom Editor, Custom Inspector, Inspector Attributes, Attribute Extensions]
codewriter-packages Open Source

OceanFSM - A Fully Featured State Machine for your Unity Projects!
Macawls Open Source

Nprp - Non-Photorealistic Render Pipeline in Unity Engine
flicker-studio Open Source

50% off Tidal Flask Studios - Publisher Sale - Tidal Flask Studios specializes in creating stylized asset packs, including high-quality environments, props, textures, and shaders. Included demo scenes and documentation make it easy to jumpstart your project, regardless of your skill level. PLUS, get FANTASTIC - Halloween Pack for FREE with code TIDALFLASK
buaacyw Open Source

Epic Royalty Free Music Collection Vol. 2 - The makings of an epic soundtrack. Looking for the perfect soundtrack to accompany your next project? Composer Joel Steudler invites you on a sonic journey with this colossal collection of royalty-free music from his intensive catalog! From entrancing synthwave to bombastic tunes perfect to make an impact in your trailer, this collection is packed with tracks suitable for films, games, or whatever you’re working on! Plus, your purchase will support JDRF in their mission to find a cure for type 1 diabetes!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Occulto - Occulto is a point and click artistic adventure game set in a fantasy world.

It is being developed by two fans of the genre. This is our very first game and we want to create an artistic adventure game, with challenging riddles, hand drawn scenes, animations and original soundtracks.

[You can get the demo on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Andrea Koutifaris, Luigi Cinelli

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

You can subscribe to the free weekly newsletter on GameDevDigest.com

This post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.