How to spy on your competition

Do you ever look at popular games and think “How did they do it?” Why are they so popular? How can I do that too? Should I be Tweeting more? (Hint: probably not).

There are a couple tricks to deconstruct how those popular games get so damn popular.

https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/01/25/how-to-spy-on-your-competition/

#marketing #gamedesign

NEW Unity ECS Profiling and Analysis Tools - Unity DOTS

I haven't noticed these new graphs in the profiler while working with Unity ECS for quite some time: entities structural changes and entities memory. So I thought this video might be helpful to get acquainted with these new features. The entities journaling in 1.0 is already added as a separate editor window, so the hassle with the debugger is not needed anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOH56gkfG4Y

#profiling #dots

Unity selected objects History Window

Also provides the favorites window. I tried a few open source solutions and this one looks the most straightforward.

https://github.com/acoppes/unity-history-window

#history #favorites #editortools

Arch.Unity: Arch ECS integration for Unity.

One of the fastest C# ECS implementations is now available in Unity. Provides:

- VContainer Integration
- Arch Hierarchy (similar to Entities Hierarchy from Unity.Entities)
- Jobs support (reference types and structural changes are not allowed since there is no EntityCommandBuffer; however, based on my experience with Unity.Entities structural changes can be done via NativeArray, which is filled with entities to be changed, and the actual structural change is performed after the job on the main thread, this approach can be even faster than ECB)
- Conversion Workflow

https://github.com/AnnulusGames/Arch.Unity

#ecs

How QUIC Is Displacing TCP for Speed and Security

A short history of http to understand what difference each version has and why updates were needed as well as latest improvements with 3.0 and QUIC

https://engineeringatscale.substack.com/p/how-quic-is-displacing-tcp-for-speed

#network

ProjectAuditor: Project Auditor is an experimental static analysis tool for Unity Projects.

The tool made by Unity field engineers who help studios optimize their games.
Project Auditor is a static analysis tool that analyzes assets, settings, and scripts of the Unity project and produces a report containing: Code and Settings diagnostics, the last BuildReport, and assets information

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ProjectAuditor

#optimization #analysis #auditor

My favourite animation trick: exponential smoothing

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/programming/2023/02/21/exponential-smoothing.html

#smoothing #math

Unity-Style-Guide: This article contains ideas for setting up a projects structure and naming convention for scripts and assets in Unity

A great place to start creating your own project style guide. You can tweak it from the start, or take as is and tailor for your needs as your project grows.

https://github.com/justinwasilenko/Unity-Style-Guide

#style #rules

Simple Water Tutorial: I've made a simple water plane material with some common features/techniques shared below. 🫧 + Depth Fog + Animated Normals "Refraction" + Underwater Blur (nodes for fog + refraction in 🧵)

https://twitter.com/TheMirzaBeig/status/1728560272405606558

#water #shadergraph

DebugUI

A framework for building debugging tools built on Unity UI Toolkit.

https://github.com/AnnulusGames/DebugUI

#debug #tools #uitoolkit

How we got one million players to give a dam about Timberborn

A huge write-up on how developers achieved the success starting from the alpha version up to the latest content updates.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/marketing/deep-dive-how-we-got-one-million-players-to-give-a-dam-about-timberborn

#marketing

C# Meta programming with Unity

How to use source generators that open up possibilities for automating many aspects of software development, such as generating code templates, automatically creating APIs based on metadata, and implementing repetitive design patterns without the need for manual copying and pasting of code.

https://vij.app/c-meta-programming-with-unity/

More examples: https://github.com/dr-vij/UTools-Generators

#sourcegen #roslyn

UNITY NATIVE: ANDROID ASYNCHRONOUS OPERATIONS AND THREADING

Discover common pitfalls and best practices for threading in Unity when working with native Android plugins in this great post. Learn from examples of typical mistakes and how to implement threading correctly.

https://medium.com/@playtika-tech-ai/unity-native-android-asynchronous-operations-and-threading-9eb07488b5cc

#native #thread #android

DOTS-Manual

Right now, it only contains information about sync points, which are crucial for performance in an archetype ECS implementation. Therefore, it's important to understand what leads to sync points in Entities. The manual is planned to be extended, so stay tuned for more later.

Update: Info about System dependencies was added

https://github.com/bustedbunny/DOTS-Manual

#dots #ecs

UNITY NATIVE: ANDROID STUDIO TOOLS

How to analyze the contents of .apk, .aab, .arr, or .jar archive files and to check Android dependencies.

https://medium.com/@playtika-tech-ai/unity-native-android-studio-tools-b3eb4509a263

#native #profiling #analyze

Grass System Extension: Cutting

https://www.patreon.com/posts/grass-system-100668614

#shader #grass #cut

AnnulusGames/UGUIAnimationSamples: A sample project that includes implementation examples of UI animation for Unity UI (uGUI) using LitMotion and UniTask.

The repo with samples how to use LitMotion tweener, but can be used as an inspo and easily ported to any other tweener.

https://github.com/AnnulusGames/UGUIAnimationSamples

#tween #sample

AnnulusGames/Alchemy: Provides a rich set of editor extensions and serialization extensions for Unity

Another great package by Annulus Games - open source Odin alternative.

https://github.com/AnnulusGames/Alchemy

#inspector

LWGUI: A Lightweight, Flexible, Powerful Shader GUI System for Unity.

https://github.com/JasonMa0012/LWGUI

#inspector #shader

Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using

Switch, restore, sparse checkout, worktree, bisect

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/109

#git