Issue #217 - Small Games, Coding Patterns, AI, Fluid Sims and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Hope everyone had a good end of the year. We are back for the first issue of 2024. Enjoy!

Making small games, which is fun in itself - Creating small games is an enjoyable endeavor in itself. So what constitutes a small game? According to the 'Small Game Manifesto', 1 it refers to games that conclude within 10 minutes and can be easily played on browsers.
abagames.github.io

Building a self-contained game in C# under 2 kilobytes - How I fit a graphical game in C# into 2 kilobytes, with no .NET runtime required.
migeel.sk

A New Approach to Local Multiplayer / Splitscreen Perspective With Raytracing - I’m a huge fan of local multiplayer, and in particular local cooperative multiplayer. I’m also interested in 3D rendering, and especially raytracing.
ph3at.github.io

A* Tricks for Videogame Path Finding - As a part of the game, I wanted our monsters to chase the player. So I spent some time exploring and implementing different pathing techniques and I wanted to share what I discovered, especially some fun A* tricks not covered by Wikipedia. [Also, more links in the Hacker News discussion]
timmastny.com

How to Create Skies for 3D Games? - The amazing Blizzard artist Phillip Zhang shared some techniques, which will help you to build better and more interesting skyboxes.
80.lv

Simulating Fluids, Fire, and Smoke in Real-Time - Notes on the math, algorithms, and methods involved in simulating fluids like fire and smoke in real-time.
andrewkchan.dev

Games in the GPU shaders - This is not a tutorial, I write only about my way of creating logic and some useful tips and code.
arugl.medium.com

Why Am I Not Getting Wishlists? A Step By Step Solution - In today’s blog I am going to help you identify why your game is not getting wishlists. There is no guarantee here. I will just help you look at the most common problems I see from games.
howtomarketagame.com

Videos

Build Your Own Dependency Injection in less than 15 Minutes | Unity C# - If complex, rigid code has been a hurdle in adding new features to your Unity games, this video is your key to overcoming it. Learn how to apply the crucial concept of Dependency Inversion through a hands-on tutorial. This guide will lead you through creating your own lightweight, efficient Dependency Injection framework. This isn't just theoretical knowledge; it's a practical approach to making Dependency Injection a reality in your game development process.
git-amend

Create better Editor and game interfaces faster with UI Toolkit | Unite 2023 - We’re constantly evolving the UI Toolkit to put the best UI tools in the hands of our users. Watch this video for expert guidance and valuable techniques to level up your UI skills. We show you how UI Toolkit can elevate and speed up teamwork with the new data-binding system, innovative UXML objects, and tailored inspectors in UI Builder. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform how you design and create UI for both the Unity Editor and games.
Unity

Do Video Games Fake Buoyancy? - While graphics programming is the magic behind all the beautiful imagery on your computer screens, it's incredibly niche and hard to figure out. What do they even do? How do you become one? How do I get started? Is it hard? All of this will be answered and more!
Acerola

Make a living from your passion: How to turn your game into a business | Unite 2023 - How great is your game? It may have amazing retention and LTV metrics but if only a small number of people are playing and talking about it, it won’t pay you back for all your hard work. Watch this video to learn proven business-school principles for game growth that will energize you and your studio with the valuable knowledge and tools you need to make a living from your passion.
Unity

Level up your code with game programming patterns: Command pattern | Tutorial - This video covers how to use the command design pattern in a Unity project. Learn how to delay logic so you can execute, manage or plan a series of actions in a flexible way, undo and redo a set of actions, and evaluate a sequence of actions.
Unity

Assets

The Complete Learn To Code Bundle - Coding for AI, games & more

Interested in learning about the intersection of game development and the rapidly advancing technologies driving AI? This bundle of video courses from Mammoth Interactive will get you up to speed! Learn how to implement, manage, and optimize large language models like GPT with the cutting edge toolkit Ollama. Drill down on the basics of popular game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot, hone your programming skills in languages like JavaScript and Python, and much more!

Pay what you want for this bundle of over 40 comprehensive courses and help support charity with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Unity New Year Sale - Save 50%. Start 2024 and your next project right with top assets.
Unity Affiliate

50% off Vefects - Pubisher Sale - Get 50% off Vefects assets. Vefects offers next-level eye-candy vibes and game-changing VFX. Level up your game visuals and slay the virtual scene with their assets! PLUS, get Item Pickup VFX - URP for FREE with code VEFECTS
Unity Affiliate

Unity-AnimationUI - AnimationUI is a unity tool to create UI animation easily with no code. You can simply drag and drop to create some smooth UI animation.
DhafinFawwaz Open Source

DragonECS - The ECS Framework aims to maximize usability, modularity, extensibility and performance of dynamic entity changes.
DCFApixels Open Source

ImpossibleOdds-TacticalCamera - The Impossible Odds Tactical Camera package provides a plugin camera system for smoothly navigating your environments in both a top-down tactical view as well as up-close action scenes.
juniordiscart Open Source

Next-Gen-Dialogue - AI powered dialogue visual designer for Unity
AkiKurisu Open Source

Yogurt - Async Managed Entity-Component Framework for Unity
Hoodrij Open Source

LayredGlow - Layer-based Glow for Unity
nobnak Open Source

Editor-Screenshot - A unity editor script for taking screenshots in the editor.
rurre Open Source

Step - STEP is a simple HTN planner for generating text. It's essentially a very fancy template system.
ianhorswill Open Source

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

LitMotion - Lightning-fast and Zero Allocation Tween Library for Unity.
AnnulusGames Open Source

LutLight2D - Stylized pixel art lighting shader for Unity2D using a color replacement technique. It keeps the original colors of the palette and can create unusual stylization effects.
NullTale Open Source

unity-refactoring-tools - Tools for refactoring content stored in Unity Prefabs, Scenes and other Assets.
acoppes Open Source

Fantasy Map Brushes - Here you will find brush sets and tools to create fantasy maps that can add a touch of historical authenticity to any project. All my brushes are released under a CC0 License and are free for personal or commercial use.
kmalexander.com

MonoCache - MonoCache is a fast framework for caching Unity update methods by Night Train Code
MeeXaSiK Open Source

GPUInstance - Instancing & Animation library for Unity3D. This library can be used to quickly and efficiently render thousands to hundreds of thousands of complex models in Unity3D. At a high level, this library uses compute shaders to implement an entity hierarchy system akin to the GameObject-Transform hierarchy Unity3D uses.
mkrebser Open Source

forge - Forge is a "Rules Engine" for the game Magic: the Gathering.
Card-Forge Open Source

Math And Physics For Dummies - Book Bundle - Math, physics & more… For Dummies. Need some help wrapping your head around complex subjects in math and physics? This bundle of books in the popular For Dummies series is here to help with fun and approachable lessons across a number of tricky topics! Statistics All-in-One For Dummies will teach you how to interpret graphs, determine probability, critique data and more! Bone up on the fundamentals and move onto the advanced stuff like graphing functions and approximating area with Calculus For Dummies. Thermodynamics For Dummies will help you wrap your head around complex concepts like entropy and the laws of thermodynamics in an easily digestible and approachable manner. Pay what you want for all these and more—a total of 16 books—and help support buildOn with your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Cyra and the Beacon Path - Join Cyra on an intergalactic mission to find her father in this challenging platformer. Journey through seven distinctive and captivating worlds, encounter diverse and quirky new lifeforms, and unravel the mystery of Dr. Kallis’ disappearance

[You can play the demo on Steam and follow them on Twitter]
Up Down Interactive

My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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