Category: Game Development

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Unity Humble Bundle Improved With 6 New Assets

The ongoing  Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle got even better today with the addition of 6 new assets. Don’t worry if you already purchased the bundle, you will receive all of the added assets up to the tier you purchased.

The new assets added to the pack include:

  • SNAPS Prototype Asian Garden
  • SNAPS Prototype Car Park
  • SNAPS Prototype SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Asian Garden
  • SNAPS HD SciFi Urban
  • SNAPS HD Car Park

The prototype assets are low polygon models ideal for lower end hardware or as the name implies level prototyping. The HD kits on the other hand contain high quality HDRP pipeline assets for use in a commercial grade game. It should be noted that the HD packs are not currently updated to the most current HDRP and some breakage may occur. Unity have stated they intend to update the assets to the most current Unity version soon. You can learn more about the additions and see the SciFi Urban HD asset in action in the video below.

In addition to the new assets, we have already covered several of the assets included in this bundling including UModeler, Clayxels and the highly recommended Peek.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IK1IELdeN8?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Hands-On With Peek For Unity

In the next part in our going look at key extensions in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle, today we are looking at Peek from Ludiq. In previous features we have looked at UModeler and Clayxels if you are interested in learning more.

Peek is a powerful add-on the greatly changes the way you work with Unity, including features like:

  • Dynamic toolbars the replace the requirement for the Inspector windows
  • Pop up support on Ctrl+F replacing the need for the Hierarchy window
  • Sticky drag and drop
  • Quick reference inspection
  • Creator to quickly create and place objects and instances in your scene
  • Multi-object grouping

You can see Peek and most of these features in action in the video below (or here on Odysee). Peek is regularly $60 on the Unity Asset Store and is half that price (with dozens of other assets and games) in the current Bundle, expiring in 9 days.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzao1-RrSkw?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Castle Game Engine Hands-On

The Castle Game Engine is a pretty unique option. It’s a long running open source 2D/3D game engine for Pascal and Delphi developers with a recent emphasis on improving the editing experience. Hand and hand with the Castle engine is the Lazarus IDE and the open source Pascal implementation Free Pascal, which are required for Castle game development.

Top features of Castle include:

  • Use any 3D or 2D software to create your models in various formats: glTF, X3D, VRML, Spine JSON, Collada…
  • Develop cross-platform applications, for desktop (Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD…), mobile (Android, iOS), consoles (Nintendo Switch) and other devices (Raspberry Pi).
  • Visual editor to design games UI and to build applications, powerful command-line build tool under the hood.
  • Optimized rendering with a lot of graphic effects (physically-based rendering, shadows, mirrors, bump mapping, shader effects, gamma correction…).
  • Build and edit the scene graph (X3D) at runtime. Create 3D processing, visualization tools and CAD applications.
  • Extensible system for game objects, with physics, creatures with AI and navmesh, and more.
  • Access numerous services, like in-app purchases and game services on mobile devices.
  • Create cross-platform user-interface with anchors and automatic scaling.
  • Code in modern Object Pascal, an efficient OOP language with cross-platform open-source compiler (FPC), compiled to a native optimized code.

If you are interested in learning more about the Castle game engine be sure to check out the video below (or watch it here on Odysee). The Castle developers have also recently released a document making it easier for Unity developers to get up to speed with key concepts in Castle, which is available here. If you are interested in getting started with Castle and Lazarus, step by step instructions are available here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqTgbRa5Bq0?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Brackeys Calls It Quits And GameFromScratch Is Now On Odysee

We have two news stories in one today, the first a bit of sad news for Unity developers. Popular YouTube Unity tutorial creator Brackey has called it quits after 8+ years of making tutorials. Thankfully he is leaving under happy circumstances, it’s basically the digital equivalent of retirement. So to Brackeys, congratulations and best of luck to you in your future endeavours, I am sure you have helped a legion of developers learn Unity. The channel will remain up, as will the community Discord server, only the Patreon page is being removed… and of course no new content will be posted.

In completely unrelated news, GameFromScratch video content is now available on Odysee. This is not actually all that new, as Odysee is ultimately a new front end for Lbry.tv. Lbry.tv and now Odysee are the only other place beside YouTube where GFS video content is officially available. Shortly after the YouTube Extortion strike experience it became incredibly clear to me that having all of my eggs in one virtual basket was a very bad idea. Unfortunately the Lbry end user experience was never all that great. With the recent improvements and the launch of Odysee, it has become a much better alternative to YouTube, so be sure to check it out if you are looking for a YouTube alternative. There are already several game development channels on there, including GDQuest.

Learn more in the video below, or once it’s mirrored, you can watch it on Odysee too! 😉

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTt2Wx83jUo?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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VPainter For Godot

VPainter is an open source free add-on for the Godot game engine that enables you to paint directly on 3D models. There are two modes of operation, one is to paint on the vertices of the mesh, while the second involves blending up to 4 different textures into one seamless material.

VPainter is open source MIT licensed and hosted on GitHub. To get started, merely clone (git clone _____) the repository https://github.com/tomankirilov/VPainter.git.

Next, copy the addons folder into your Godot project, merging it if you already have an addons directory.

Next, fire up the Godot Engine, go to Project->Project Settings, then select the Plugins tab and click enable:

Enabling an Add-on in Godot.

VPainter is now enabled and will appear in the editor window when a MeshInstance is selected. For further details on how to use VPainter or to simply see it in action, check out the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVxemrkB3Mg?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Unity 2020.2 Beta Released

Unity 2020.2 beta is here and given the released number of releases that Unity are going to do annually, that makes this a more significant release than in the past. This beta release includes several system level and quality of life improvements including:

  • Support for C# 8
  • Dark Mode IDE support (this was actually added to previous versions as well)
  • C# compiler and IL2CPP compiler improvements
  • EIP, or Editor Iteration Profiler, to help identify bottlenecks during domain reloads
  • Unity Safe Mode for troubleshooting script errors on startup
  • Profiler improvements
  • New localization and UI design packages
  • URP and HDRP pipelines both improved
  • VFX Graph output events (lights, sounds, physics and custom C# code call-outs)
  • Shader Graph
  • New UI designer tools
  • 2D tools streamlined, repackaged and improved
  • Support for Apple ARM on desktop architecture
  • Much, much more.

Be sure to check out the complete release notes for more details on the changes in Unity 2020.2. You can also learn more about the release in the video below, including a small rant about one of the biggest problems facing Unity these days… fragmentation and stability.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ2GM5JfwEA?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Clayxels — Bringing Clay Modelling and Claymation to Unity

Currently featured in the Unity Game Dev Humble Bundle as well as being 50% off on the Unity Asset Store, Clayxel is an asset that extends Unity to add support for modelling then animating clay-like 3D objects.

Clayxels is described on the Store page as:

Clayxels is an interactive volumetric toolkit to sculpt models in editor and in game. It uses voxels to generate a lightweight point-cloud that can be changed in real-time and used in a whole bunch of different ways, all without any heavy pixel ray-marching. Works both in editor and in game, everything made with clayxels can be changed interactively at any time.

Works with all render pipelines, built-in, URP, HDRP.

It is important to note that Clayxel currently *does not* support the WebGL targets. In the video below we go hands-on with Clayxel, give you an overview of it’s capabilities and show you a simple tutorial on how to get up and running creation clay objects in your Unity game. The Unity Humble Bundle runs until the end of September, so don’t miss out if Clayxel looks interesting to you. Another asset in the bundle, UModeler, was covered in an earlier GFS post. The above links contain an affiliate code that pays a small commission to GameFromScratch if used to purchase (and thanks so much if you do!).

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYJGOVWb628?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Echo Engine Hands-On

Today we are taking a look at the open source cross platform 2D/3D C++ based Lua-powered game engine Echo. While Echo is very much it’s own engine, it has a very Godot vibe in the way your game scene is organised, taking a node based approach to game development. The engine is released under the very permissive MIT open source license.

From the project GitHub page, Echo is described as:

Echo is a new game engine, which used more industry-standard of nowadays for game development. The new design concept makes the engine simplicity to use. but more powerful. Scene manager is easy, No Entiy, No GameObject, No Component, No Prefab. Only Node and NodeTree.

In the video below we go hands-on with this active open source project. In the later half of the video we show how you can build the engine on Windows, before you begin however you will need to have Visual Studio 2019 with C++ support and CMake installed on your machine.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFlUkzqf030?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Make Games Play Games By Raspberry Pi Humble Bundle

There is a Humble Bundle of interest to game developers running now, the Make Games, Play Games by Raspberry Pi bundle. The heart of this bundle are three e-books on the topic of retro game development, as well as one e-book on the topic of building your own FPS in Unity. Additionally the bundle consists of several issues in PDF format of Wireframe and Custom PC magazines.

It should be noted that you can already download PDF versions of the Wireframe magazine here. It is one of the only magazines out there that covers the programming side of game development so it is definetly worth a look, especially considering the free price tag. You can learn more about the rest of this bundle in the video below.

The bundle is organised into tiers, and if you buy a higher dollar value tiers, you get all of the tiers below it as well. As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, between the Publisher, Humble, charity and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS by purchasing using this link.

EDIT: It seems that two of the books are also available for free download on the Raspberry Pi site, Build your own FPS and Code the Classics Volume 1 are both available here. That makes this bundle mostly about supporting the Raspberry Pi group it would seem.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSdlLpRNDZg?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]
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Free Books From Fanatical Celebrating the Day of the Programmer

I didn’t even realize this was a thing, but as a programmer, I’m not going to complain. Apparently September the 12th, the 28 th day, or 0x100 in Hexadecimal is the Day of the Programmer, at least in Russia where it is formally recognized.

To celebrate this someone… arbitrary day, Fanatical are giving away a couple of ebooks of interest to developers, Learn Java 12 Programming, Expert Python Programming and Beginning C++ Programming. Additionally they are giving a 20% off discount code for their long running Packt Book Bundles, that we previously covered in more depth here and here. Simply log into (or create) a Fanatical account and “buy” the three books for free. Be sure to get them before this expires Sept 18th!

You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPjvjetXB2A?feature=oembed&w=1500&h=844]