As a game developer constantly striving to enhance my craft, I'm always on the lookout for innovative techniques and useful libraries. In this monthly roundup, I'm excited to share with you the gems that caught my attention. Let's dive into September's discoveries!
Sort, sweep, and prune: Collision detection algorithms
Sweep-and-prune is my go-to algorithm when I want to quickly implement collision detection for a game. I think it’s an awesome and elegant algorithm, so I wrote a post about it.
— Lean Rada
Link
https://leanrada.com/notes/sweep-and-prune/
Why it's good
In this well-illustrated and documented series of articles, Lean Rada exposes a simple yet powerful method to implement collision detection that can handle hundreds or thousands of elements.
The implementation is accessible and not very hard to replicate, which makes it a good trade-off between naive brute-force collision checking and integrating an existing physics engine (with all the inferred complexity).
If you like elegant implementations and algorithms, whether or not you need collision detection, you'll probably enjoy the reading.
The Procedural Animation of Gibbon: Beyond the Trees - Wolfire Games
A video about procedural animation with deep insight.
Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCKdGlpsdlo
Why it's good
Wolfire Games is mostly known for Overgrowth, a fun and nervous fighting game where you play a martial-art-master anthropomorphic rabbit.
In this video, we can see how the learnings from Overgrowth's procedural animations (that started a loooong time ago) was translated in a very different game.
Fifteen years later, we get a very clear, well-illustrated video that demonstrates how to procedurally animate gibbons. The insight is both inspiring and gives actionable tips you could use in your production. I highly recommend it.
80+ tips to increase productivity with Unity 2022 LTS
Official Unity cookbook.
Link
Why it's good
If you haven't read it yet, now might be a good time because it will give you production tips. I knew some of them already, but a reminder never hurts. Here are the ones I can't stop using
- Focused Inspectors: Select a game object in hierarchy or project view then alt+P (or right-click → properties). It opens an inspector that will always show the selected element. I always keep the I2 window for translations and use this trick instead of inspector lock whenever I need to drag and drop multiple selected elements into some inspector list.
- Scene visibility: Use the "eye" icon in the hierarchy view to hide that huge annoying UI to edit the 3D objects of the scene without it.
- Shortcut manager: Rebind or discover keyboard shortcuts to accelerate frequent actions. "F" to frame selected item in view, "ctrl+D" to duplicate, "shift+A" to toggle the selected gameobject active state.
Make the Trailer Before the Game: A Marketing First Way to Prototype
Prolific game trailer editor Derek Lieu shares step-by-step instructions and best practices for conceiving game ideas via mockup trailers.
Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10YhD9HMsPA
Why it's good
I got very inspired by this one. Here are my takeways :
-
If we don't know what to put in our trailer, it means we don't know why our game is cool or what we want to show.
⇒ It's worth starting with the trailer to ensure the direction of the game. -
If an idea is cool, we should be able to say "I can see how this could be in the trailer!". If not, the idea is probably not that appealing.
⇒ It's worth starting with the trailer to test the "cool factor" of features before fully implementing them. -
It helps to design memorable moments, around which we can then build the gameplay.
⇒ It's worth starting with the trailer to create narrative pillars. -
"If you're not excited at the start, it's not great to assume you're gonna get excited later."
— Greg Kasavin, Supergiant Games -
The obvious advantages: having a communication and promotion support for the team (sharing vision, setting the mood), for the investors, starting to hook future players very early.
There are plenty of examples, references, illustrations, and small tips in the video. These 30 minutes are worth it.
That's it, if you liked all those tips, don't forget to follow me on your favorite network for more!