Issue #81 - 2D, Animation, and more

Lots of varied content this week, with some emphasis on 2D, animations, vfx and more. Grab it while it's hot!

A lightning round of great tips for 2D games - Are you planning to make a 2D game with Unity? Then take a look at these handy tips from our 2D Technical Product Manager Rus Scammell and 2D Product Marketing Manager Eduardo Oriz, that will help you get started quickly and work efficiently throughout your entire project.
Unity

Animate a Character - Learning how to animate a character is a pivotal part of creating a game. Animations breathe life into your game and can influence a player’s emotions and responses. Have a character wince when they get hurt and the player instantly understands what happened and that they should avoid it. Making the character bob up and down and lean forward while running and the game instantly feels faster. This can all be done with animations.
monkeykidgc.com

Stairs - A Long Thread about stairs! Wohoooooo!
Tommy Norberg @the_Norberg

How to Use Occlusion Culling in Unity — The Sneaky Way - Rendering unnecessary elements is making your scenes look worse than they could.
The Gamedev Guru

Linear Interpolation - This tutorial will explore one of the most used Mathematical tools in Game Development: linear interpolation! This first post will focus on its Mathematical definition and implementation. The following parts of this series will explore how to extend linear interpolation to non-linear mappings, and how to use them to correct colour curves.
Alan Zucconi

Game Design: Making Intuitive Tutorials for your Games - In creating our games, we always need to keep in mind how we’re going to teach the player the mechanics of the game. How are we going to teach them how to control the player, how to engage with the game’s systems, and what the story of the game is?
gamedevacademy.org

Introducing Shader Graph’s new Master Stack - In Unity 2020.2, we introduced several new features in Shader Graph that improved the workflow for artists. For example, by refining the user experience overall and introducing the Graph Inspector, Graph Editor performance has been greatly improved. As the end point of the Graph, the Master Stack is now a modular collection of feature blocks, replacing the monolithic Master Node.
Unity

RectMask2D - Use RectMask2D instead of Mask component to mask rectangular elements of your UI. RectMask2D does not use stencil buffer and produces less amount of extra draw calls.
FantaJI Games @FantaJIGames

unitytips: Hierarchy Window Group Header - You can create a visual header to any group of components on your hierarchy window using EditorApplication.hierarchyWindowItemOnGUI:
diegogiacomelli.com.br

Localizing Unity Games with the Official Localization Package - Learn how to use Unity’s first-party localization package to make your games available to the world.
phrase.com

Unity 2021.1.0 Beta 6 - Unity 2021.1.0 Beta 6 has been released.
Unity

Videos

Unity VFX Graph - Heat Distortion Effect Tutorial - Let's see how to create a Heat Distortion effect in HDRP and URP. Also known has heat haze or air distortion is a visual effect used many times in games to convey the feeling of something so hot that it distorts the air around it or to create a mirage.
Gabriel Aguiar Prod.

2D lighting in unity - A quick look at 2D lighting in Unity 3D using many different methods form screen overlay and static light to animated sprite renderers and volumetric shadow effects. None of these use the unity 2D lighting system or any light at all but a number of art and design techniques.
Christopher Tharp

Controlling Cross-Platform Characters with Unity Input System | Tutorial - In this video, we are showing you how to create a cross-platform character controller using Unity's Input System!
Unity

Creating Game-ready Rigs #1 (Blender 2.8/2.9 to UE4/Unity/Godot) - This is a new video in my Blender to Game Engines series (aka "Bridging the Gap"). Here is the full playlist:
CGDive

Generate a Mesh Asset Using Compute Shaders in the Unity Editor! | Game Dev Tutorial - Compute shaders are scripts than run on the GPU and are specialized at solving problems that can be broken into many parts. If this describes a mesh you want to generate, they can do it super fast! In this video, I'll show you how to procedurally generate a mesh in the Unity Editor - using compute shaders - and save it as a mesh asset file.
Ned Makes Games

UPDATE Ghibli Stylized Grass Shadows in Eevee Made EASY | Blender Tutorial (Follow-Up) - A follow up to my previous tutorial on creating Ghibli stylized grass with working dynamic shadows in Blender Eevee. A lot of progress has been made thanks to Kidane (https://twitter.com/Puffertron​) and his method. In this video I attempt to explain what he did different, why, and how I modified it a bit further to produce an even better result.
LanceBeryl

Visual Effects Bootcamp: The Elementary Particles - In this 2018 GDC session, Arkane Studios' Mickaelle Ruckert discusses how changing game companies and the type of game she was working on helped her re-evalulate the basics of visual effects design.
GDC

How I Made My Indie Game's Combat Fun! | Unity Game Devlog - Variety is the spice of life, and apparently shooting as well. So I added a few more ways to murder your friends to my upcoming split screen fps game! Namely, grenades and melee attacks.
ButWhyLevin

Devlog 01: ProBuilder Level Design & Greyboxing in Unity - Let's take a few minutes to talk through the process of greyboxing and value of moving quickly in early level design.
Pyramid Lake Games

Assets

Lunar New Year Mega Bundles - The Unity Asset Store is currently running an exciting Lunar = New Year Mega Bundle sale! Users can save up to 96% with these curated bundles of top quality assets= , which will include tools and art through February 26.

$9.99 Bundle - save up to 90%
This bundle contains PBR Material Bundle Vol1 (445), Roslyn C# - Runtime Compiler, and Loading Screen.

$19.99 Bundle - Save up to 95%
This bundle contains everything from the $9.99 bundle, plus Asset Cleaner PRO - Clean | Find References, POLYGON - Knights Pack, Shader Weaver, Bio IK, Top Down - Fantasy Forest, and Japanese Alley.

$29.99 Bundle - Save up to 96%
This bundle contains everything from the $9.99 and $19.99 bundles, plus UI Particle System, uRPG - Singleplayer RPG, Everyday Motion Pack, Little Heroes Mega Pack, Polyverse Skies • Low poly skybox shaders and textures, Paint Craft (Drawing & Coloring book engine), Low Poly Vegetation Pack, GUI PRO Kit - Casual Game, Cartoon FX Remaster, Puppet2D, and Oak Forest Environment.
Unity Affiliate

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: BIG MUSIC 2 - We’re bringing a serious set of royalty-free musical magic in our newest bundle for game developers, film and content creators! Get music packs like Fantasy Adventure Orchestral Loops Pack, Electronic Industrial Music Pack, and Space Music Themes - Puzzle & Casual Games. Plus, your purchase helps support the Prevent Cancer Foundation & Save the Children!
$295 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF
PAY $1 OR MORE
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Smart Hierarchy v0.2.9 - Collection of QoL improvements for Unity Hierarchy. Designed with a native-feel and intuitiveness in mind.
neon-age Open Source

Unity-AssetPostProcessor - How I have setup my default import pipeline for Unity. These are my preferred values for Models, Textures, and Audio. Unity's AssetPostprocessor lets you hook into the import pipeline and run scripts prior or after importing assets.
justinwasilenko Open Source

The Long Reach assets - I decided to giveaway for free assets from my previous project TheLongReach. There are images and sounds, and they are not that well categorised.
Roman Karpenter

HDRPTemplateStylized - HDRP Unity 2020 Template !! Toon ShaderedHundred points symbolShader Graph. Step Lighting, texture and color Shadows/AO/Specular. Depth/Normals Edge detection(shadows too). No post processing. HDRP Volumetric Lighting and shadow quality are awesome.
Christopher Sims Open Source

HUMBLE SOFTWARE BUNDLE: LEARN TO CREATE GAMES IN UNITY - Kickstart your game development career with GameDev.tv! Get courses like Complete C# Unity Game Developer 3D, Unity Multiplayer Coding & Networking, RPG Core Combat Creator and Complete C# Unity Developer 2D. Plus, your purchase will support Girls Who Code!
$1,369 WORTH OF AWESOME STUFF.
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Humble Bundle Affiliate

Laigter - This tool lets you generate normal maps for 2D textures, with little effort. Specially designed for Sprites in 2D games. Specular map generation is possible too, which gives your sprites the shininess they need to look PRO! It also let's you create parallax maps, mainly intended for backgrounds, to obtain a nice 3D effect in 2D games!
azagaya

Scandy - The app making everyone a 3D creator. Scandy Pro enables anyone to create high resolution, full-color 3D scans with iPhone X series, iPhone 11 series, and iPhone 12 series devices. Scandy Pro also works with iPad Pro models from 2018 and later.
www.scandy.co

Spotlight

Vast - Vast. Space is vast in many ways. In terms of sheer size and volume but also in terms of its mystery and secrets. Join the International Space Consortium (ISC) on their mission to discover new and incredible planets teeming with the potential for expansion. As the lead Explorer of the Advanced Recon and Colonization team (ARC) your goals are to survey strange new worlds, uncover their scientific merits, and above all else; survive until help can arrive!
Dev_Bros

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