Game Dev Digest — Issue #319 - 2D Guides, Game Ideas/Concepts, Optimizing, and more

Issue #319 - 2D Guides, Game Ideas/Concepts, Optimizing, and more

This article was originally published on GameDevDigest.com

Enjoy!

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Our ultimate 2D game art, animation, and lighting guide is now updated for Unity 6.3 LTS - Our goal for 2D creators is not only to develop the most stable and powerful 2D tooling but also to provide the industry-standard in learning and upskilling content for our users. Whether guides, videos, or sample projects, these resources present the best practices, techniques, and tips you need to efficiently create performant 2D games in any style and genre – from retro pixel art to sophisticated 2D with dynamic lighting and 3D elements.
Unity

Big Farm: Homestead – Inside the tech behind a 3D mobile world - New Moon Production was founded in 2016 with the goal of staying at the forefront of game development technology while keeping production sustainable. Over the past decade, the studio has shipped games including Empire: World War 3, Empire: Age of Knights, Home & Garden: Design Makeover, Love & Passion: Chapters, Big Farm: Mobile Harvest, Big Farm: Story, and Sunshine Island.
Unity

Reducing Tiled Maps to Optimized Collision Rectangles with Greedy Merging - Tile-based editors like Tiled are excellent authoring tools. They allow designers to think in terms of cells, patterns, and repetition, which is exactly what makes them productive. However, the data they produce is optimized for editing, not for runtime use.
emanueleferonato.com

Behaviour Trees versus State Machines - Generally, it is easiest to think of AI in games to be primarily used for creating interesting hostile enemies such as the guards in Metal Gear Solid games or the Alien (Xenomorph) in Alien: Isolation. However they are also used for the cute characters in the Animal Crossing games, or the slimes in Slime Rancher. But then getting even past tangible characters, there is “The Director” in Left For Dead 2, which is an AI solution that dynamically adjusts the game based on current conditions.
queenofsquiggles.codeberg.page

Indie Studio Lead Discusses Creating a Game & How to Stay Competitive - Patrick McAvena, the President of an indie development studio Moving Pieces Interactive talked to us about the studio's philosophy, creating and distributing its title Shoulders of Giants, and how it approaches development to stay competitive in the market.
80.lv

Sampling vs Instrumentation in Unity, Field Ops with Very Sleepy - Myth: “The Unity Profiler shows everything.” Reality: It shows what’s instrumented. Sampling profilers reveal the rest.
thegamedev.guru

Contractor management platform Mellow launches new indie support program - Offers six months of full access to recruitment and management tools for $1 per contractor per month
gamesindustry.biz

Videos

Async in Unity: Main Thread First, Multithread When Needed - Awaitable brings modern async/await into Unity in a way that actually fits the engine, letting you write clean asynchronous code without freezing frames or fighting the player loop—and when you do need multithreaded work, it gives you a safe, explicit way to step off the main thread and come back without breaking Unity’s API rules. In this video, we break down what async really means in Unity, how coroutines differ from async/await, where traditional Task-based patterns fall short, and how Awaitable helps you build responsive loading flows, frame-safe delays, and background processing without turning your code into callback soup or hitching the game loop.
git-amend

11 Game Design Concepts You Didn't Know You Needed - I run through 11 game design concepts I learned the hard way in game dev, so that you can make better games!
Tim Ruswick

Pyrite64 - N64 Engine & Editor [Release] - I'm happy to release "Pyrite64", an N64 game engine and editor.
HailToDodongo

How to Steal Game Ideas (Without Copying) - How do you make an original game without copying? In this video, I break down how to “steal like an artist” in game development. Learn how to build around powerful player fantasies, reduce friction, borrow proven systems, and recombine ideas into something truly original and marketable on Steam.
Payne Robinson

Blender 5.1 - AWESOME New Features for Game Developers! - Blender 5.1 Beta is here, and it's comes with some amazing new features. Today we check out some of those new features, with an eye towards the stuff that game developers will use the most. This includes more geometry node improvements including the exciting new raycast mode, some amazing quality of life AI improvements and much more. …
Gamefromscratch

Modern Games Are Over-Tutorialized. Here's Why - Here's why old game's didn't have tutorials
Murray

How I made a shooter game in 64 KB - QUOD game page: https://daivuk.itch.io/quod
daivuk

Unity Video Tutorial: Getting Started with Timeline - Timeline is a sequencing tool in Unity that lets you visually create, edit, and control time-based events like animations, audio, signals, and gameplay sequences, without hard-coding timing logic. In this video we show you how to get started using it.
Unity

Assets

World-Shaking Flash Deals - 70% off everything you need to build incredible worlds — for 24 hours only. New Assets drop daily.
Unity Affiliate

Shop up to 50% off Asset Mage W - Publisher Sale - Jimmy (aka Asset Mage W) turned a fascination for visual effects into a professional career in game VFX. He is now an avid follower and early adopter of the newest VFX Graph features. PLUS get UNI VFX: Missiles & Explosions for Visual Effect Graph for FREE with code ASSETMAGEW
Unity Affiliate

Game Audio Collection - 1,800+ Music Tracks & 65,000+ Sound Effects - 65,000+ professional audio assets ready for production. Calling all game developers and video creators! This massive audio bundle delivers 1,800+ high-quality music tracks and 65,000+ sound effects built for real projects and real pipelines. From dark fantasy scores for RPGs to punchy UI sounds, ambient soundscapes, and high-energy tracks for action and cinematic scenes, there’s music, sound effects and voice packs here for every style and genre. All assets are created by experienced contributors from GameDev Market, giving you production-ready sound at a huge scale. Expand your audio library, speed up your workflow, and support Hello World when you pick up this bundle through Humble Bundle. All of the software in this bundle is available DRM-Free via direct download.
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Status Effect Framework - Status Effect Framework is a framework for implementing status effects into any game. It is easy to use, and fully customizable.
maraudical Open Source

net.peeweek.gameplay-ingredients - Gameplay Ingredients for your Unity Games - A collection of runtime and editor scripts that ease simple tasks while making games and prototypes.
peeweek Open Source

Localization-Unity - Localization System For Unity Engine Supports More Than 100+ Languages
PicoShot Open Source

cesium-unity - Bringing the 3D geospatial ecosystem to Unity
CesiumGS Open Source

MetaVoiceChat - Self-contained proximity voice chat solution for Unity with easy setup
Metater Open Source

UnitySimplePhysics - Simple Physics provides lightweight, easy-to-use physics-based behaviors for Unity. (Rope, Cloth, SoftBodies)
JohannHotzel Open Source

unity3d-rainbow-folders - This asset allows you to set custom icons for any folder in unity project browser.
Borod4r Open Source

BurstFFT - FFT implementation in C# optimized for Unity's Burst compiler
keijiro Open Source

DeckBuilderRoguelikeEngine - A structural playground for building roguelike card battle systems.
K-mohameduuu Open Source

unitext - Text engine for Unity that correctly renders every writing system — Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, CJK, emoji, and 150+ others. Built on HarfBuzz, the same shaping engine used by Chrome, Firefox, Adobe InDesign, and Android. 3-21× faster than TextMeshPro
LightSideMeowshop Open Source

BrightStateMachine - Unity FSM to control flow, menus, game objects and behaviours.
carreraSilvio Open Source

sprite-dicing - Cross-engine tool for lossless compression of sprites with identical regions
elringus Open Source

VoxelWorldUnity - A procedual voxel world generator using Unity engine
Nauzoo Open Source

CENSOR - Screen-Space Quantization and Refraction (FREE) - "SSQR" for Non-Degenerate Rendering and μ-Rasterization via Per-Pixel, GPU-Accelerated Parallel Processing in Unity (URP). Read about the implementation here]
Mirza Beig Affiliate

AERO - Volumetric Fog and Mist (FREE) - A URP volumetric fog and mist renderer feature.
Mirza Beig Affiliate

Level Up 5K World Building Assets Bundle - Build the game of your dreams in any setting or scenario with our Level Up: 5K World Building Assets Bundle. The possibilities are endless—this massive library has everything from medieval to cyberpunk, gothic to ‘80s-inspired styles. Bring life and style to your projects with assets that let you create specialized hospitals, atmospheric taverns, underground subways, and more. Don’t wait—grab this jam-packed collection of high-quality 3D assets today and support Child's Play your purchase!
Humble Bundle Affiliate

Spotlight

Trappist - Welcome to Trappist-1, 40.7 light-years from Earth. Fly your Ark, a colossal spaceship and mobile base. Explore the solar system and establish thriving colonies. Uncover the mysteries of Trappist in this story-driven colony builder.

[Out now on Steam]
Sirrah

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My game, Call Of Dookie. Demo available on Steam

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