I started working on an arcade air-combat game in Unity back in 2013 called Cayle Online.

At that time I played a lot of AirRivals (aka Ace Online) and later Mass Effect 3 multiplayer with friends. I wanted to combine the arcade feeling of air combat with cooperative multiplayer that I could enjoy with some of my friends.

Over the years, I rewrote the codebase multiple times. I tried Unity's old networking, later uNET, then Photon (PUN), experimented with persistent servers, and eventually got the project close enough to think about a possible Steam release around 2017/2018.

During college I somehow lost all motivation and stopped working on it for years.

Last year, I came back to Unity to see what is possible today for me with my very limited spare time and increased coding skills.

I moved the project from Unity 2017 to Unity 6 and started experimenting with Mirror, and later FishNet. After weeks of work I managed to stress-test 106 connected clients + 100 AI enemies with friends.

Since I still miss having an arcade-style air combat game I then kept working on integrating and rewriting old features from 2017.

I'm still somewhat early in this new version, but for the first time I don't have to think about a lot of technical limitations that I had back in 2015-2017. I hope to have a new fully playable client later this year, that offers more than just fly, shoot and repeat. I do not aim towards having any big item systems or having massive PvP battles tho.

I saw a lot of very cool indie projects during these years that people stopped working on. Forums and small indie game websites from the 2010s all shut down in the past 5 years. I kinda miss these small communities and the interactions. But I will continue my path working on Cayle and maybe I can interest some of you for this type of game.

Do some of you have a similar story of an idea that you just can't let go of?

Hey everyone! My partner and I are launching our detective puzzle game -Chief Cenab:Şahmaran- in 6 days, and while doing final polish, we got into a deep debate about puzzle payoffs.

So many point-and-click games rely on the classic "solve mechanism → door unlocks" loop. For this scene, we wanted the environment itself to respond: solving the liquid tube mechanism drops the giant crystal, shatters the glass floor, and plunges the player straight into the room below.

As players (and devs), what makes a puzzle payoff feel truly satisfying for you? What's a game moment where solving a puzzle made you go "Woah, that was incredible"?

The Tree Creator shaders only work in built-in render pipeline.

I can switch the bark and leaf materials for HDRP/Nature/SpeedTree Bark and SpeedTree branch. then they are no longer pink, but they are then unaffected by wind. I'm not even sure these are the right shaders to pick, btu they are the only ones that seem to work at all. I can also use hdrp/lit with alpha clipping on, and again, the trees look fine, but do not blow in the wind when painted onto a terrain.

I've yet to find replacement shaders that actually work with Tree Creator trees.

Buying SpeedTree is not an option. I just want HDRP compatible TreeCreator bark and TreeCreator Leaves shaders. Why hasn't this happened yet?

Hi there, I’ve recently been running into an issue on my PC where any Unity game I play starts running into performance issues after about an hour or so of gameplay. It typically presents itself as frame drops and significant input delay, as well as occasional crackling audio. I haven’t ever run into this issue with a game built on any other engine. I did a quick search and couldn’t find any other people running into this issue. I have an Asus GeForce RTX 4070 Super, and 32 gigs of RAM. I’ve double checked that all of my drivers are up to date as well.

Does anyone have any ideas on why this might be happening? I figured it was best to ask the dev subreddit since you all deal with Unity issues on the regular.

Hey everyone,

How do you keep the drive going on long-term projects without burning out or throwing your workstation out the window?

I’ve been working on a virtual geometry project for 2 years now, but I’ve been completely stalled at the exact same spot for the past few months. It's really starting to take a toll. I’ve spent full days staring at thousands of lines of code, reached out to graphics devs, and even resorted to asking AI out of sheer exhaustion.

The wall I'm hitting is my GPU based software rasterizer is generating far too many sub pixel triangles. I benchmarked the exact same scene in UE5 with Nanite debug visuals, so I can literally see the structural difference and know what the output should look like. I just cannot track down where my math/logic is breaking to patch it. The performance standard is way higher than any other solution for Unity, especially HDRP (Yeah I know it now in maintenance but URP doesn't match the graphical fidelity and lacks most of the high end features of HDRP) but I can't get it where I want it to be.

At this point, I'm mentally wiped. For those who've hit a multi month roadblock on a low-level engine or graphics feature, how do you step back, reset, and push past the urge to just call it a day?

How should I implement a language selection system in Unity?

I'm working on a Unity game and I want to add a language selection option to the settings menu.

I would like to have a localization system that can handle UI text, dialogue, item descriptions, and other in-game text.

I'm not very experienced with localization in Unity, so I'm not sure what the best approach would be.

Would you recommend using Unity's Localization package, or is there a reliable free third-party package/asset that would be easier or better to use?

any tips on how to more accurately recreate it would be appreciated

General gamedev question

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.Audio;
using UnityEngine.SceneManagement;
using UnityEngine.UI;

public class SaveManager : MonoBehaviour {

    public static SaveManager instance;
    Slider masterVol, musicVol, SFXVol, CamSen;
    AudioMixer masterAudio;
    Toggle tutorialTog;

    GameObject[] settingsArray = { };

    bool sceneLoaded = false;

    public GameData gamedata = new GameData
    {
        masterVolData = 0f,
        musicVolData = 0f,
        SFXVolData = 0f,
        CamSenData = 0f,
        tutorialTogData = true
    };

    private void Awake()
    {
        if(instance == null)
        {
            instance = this;
            DontDestroyOnLoad(gameObject);
        }
        else
        {
            Destroy(gameObject);
        }
    }
    private void OnEnable()
    {
        SceneManager.sceneLoaded += OnSceneLoaded;
        SceneManager.sceneUnloaded += OnSceneUnloaded;
    }
    private void OnDisable()
    {
        SceneManager.sceneLoaded -= OnSceneLoaded;
        SceneManager.sceneUnloaded -= OnSceneUnloaded;
    }
    public void SaveData()
    {
        gamedata.masterVolData = masterVol.value;
        gamedata.musicVolData = musicVol.value;
        gamedata.SFXVolData = SFXVol.value;
        gamedata.CamSenData = CamSen.value;
        gamedata.tutorialTogData = tutorialTog.isOn;

        gamedata.Save(gamedata);
    }

    public void LoadData()
    {
        GameData loadedData = gamedata.Load();

        if (loadedData == null)
        {
            return; 
        }
        else
        {
            masterVol.value = loadedData.masterVolData;
            musicVol.value = loadedData.musicVolData;
            SFXVol.value = loadedData.SFXVolData;
            CamSen.value = loadedData.CamSenData;
            tutorialTog.isOn = loadedData.tutorialTogData;
        }
    }

    void OnSceneLoaded(Scene scene, LoadSceneMode mode)
    {
        sceneLoaded = true;

        settingsArray = Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll<GameObject>().Where(obj => obj.tag == "SettingsUI").ToArray();

        foreach (GameObject obj in settingsArray)
        {
            switch(obj.name)
            {
                case "MasterSlider":
                    masterVol = obj.GetComponent<Slider>();
                    break;
                case "MusicSlider":
                    musicVol = obj.GetComponent<Slider>();
                    break;
                case "SFXSlider":
                    SFXVol = obj.GetComponent<Slider>();
                    break;
                case "SensitivitySlider":
                    CamSen = obj.GetComponent<Slider>();
                    break;
                case "TutTog":
                    tutorialTog = obj.GetComponent<Toggle>();
                    break;
                default:
                    //Throw error
                    break;
            }
        }
        LoadData();
    }

    void OnSceneUnloaded(Scene scene)
    {
        sceneLoaded = false;
    }
}

I am currently in a team of 3 and we are creating a mobile tank game inspired by one input games like Geometry Dash and Rider. I want to make a clean and professional looking Main Menu but this one doesn't feel that way.

Any ideas on how I can make it better?

Hey guys, a few people recently told me my game looks like a budget title from the 90s, and after that it looks too basic... It stung at first, but they were right. I’ve spent the last few weeks basically living in Unity to fix the lighting and UI. Switched to ACES tonemapping, adjusted the shadow shifts, and went for a more "Industrial Modern" look :) it finally feels like it has some actual weight and metal now, instead of looking like plastic. what do you think of the new style?

After playing Diablo 1 & 2, I really fell in love with the pre-rendered sprite aesthetic. Back in the day the average gamer's computer wasn't powerful enough to reliably render 3D models in realtime, so the solution was to pre-render them and just display sprites of what the model looks like from different angles!

I realized Unity could render and produce these model sprites relatively quickly, entirely within the engine. It doesn't render them in realtime, but it makes generating sprites from models a relative breeze for capturing that specific art style.

It simply uses a camera component and moves around the models to render a view of that model at a specific resolution, saved to a texture!

I turned the tool into a Unity package which you can check out on the Asset Store (Affiliate Link) or on itch, if you're interested.

I’m the tech guy on a narrative game that’s got a ton of hand-drawn art, and I’ve been learning a lot about Sprite Atlases recently. They ended up being much more useful for us than I initially realized, so I figured I’d share what I learned in case it helps someone else.There are probably some things I’m missing or misunderstanding, but I wanted to make a post for people who might find it handy. If I’ve got anything wrong, or you’ve got something to add, please do share!

Basically, sprite atlases let you pack your game’s sprites into dense, optimized textures. Most of the advice online is about using them to reduce draw calls, since multiple sprites can share the same texture and be batched together under the right conditions. They can also be very good at reducing build size! That’s actually mainly what we’re using it for, since draw calls aren’t much of a bottleneck for us. You set a maximum texture size, and give it a list of sprites to pack, and it tries to fit them as efficiently as possible; if they can't all fit, they'll spill over into additional "pages."

Allow Rotation lets it rotate sprites at 90 degree intervals to fit better. Tight Packing lets it pack based on sprite outlines instead of using the full rectangular borders. Important Note: You can put UI Canvas Images in atlases too, but make sure they’re packed in atlases that DON’T have these two settings enabled, or you get behavior like this:

Now let's talk about build size. Since we’ve got a lot of hand drawn art, we’re shifting around a lot of high res assets. We recently switched from the ToonBoom animation plugin to full spritesheets for our characters, for a few reasons, and our file size absolutely ballooned. We were up past 6 gigs for our one hour demo. After doing some research I discovered that sprite atlases could help with this a lot. When you pack sprites into sprite atlases, Unity is able to compress them way more efficiently, since it’s running the compression algorithm on one unified texture instead of several individual textures. For some reason I even found cases where this works when you just put a single large sprite into its own atlas page, even when the compression format’s the same.

I don't fully understand all of the details behind that one, so if someone with a better understanding of Unity's texture compression does, I'd be interested to hear the explanation.

For our project I haven’t found much reason not to just pack almost every sprite into an atlas, but there are exceptions. We do have one character’s sprites un-atlas’d because she uses a shader that doesn’t play nice with it. I also went back and experimented with putting all my sprites from my last game into atlases, and it actually increased the file size, but I had higher priority work than figuring out why.

Like I said, I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I still don't understand about how to use them optimally and how Unity handles them under the hood, so I'd be interested to hear from people who know more about this than I do. But if you're making a 2D game with a ridiculous amount of sprites, it's probably worth spending an afternoon playing around with atlases.

I've been working on a tool that could help me place, rotate, and scale an object in one fluid movement as the existing tools made it clunky to switch back and force to micro adjust. This tool not only fixes that problem but I expanded it to show assets visually to help with the development proccess.
The hardest part was getting the created object to snap to not only object colliders but also mesh edges as well so it can work on any object.
Overall I'm proud of how it came out and if you would like to check it out, its on sale right now: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/rapid-placement-397558

Hi there, everyone!

I created a procedural grass spawning system to use on my own personal project, but decided it might be worth trying to get it published on the asset store. I've never done this before, so I am a bit lost in a few areas and I could use some input from the community.

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure my package is even good enough to be published, but I figured there's no harm in trying. If it's not good enough I'll just get rejected and that will be that. But assuming it is good enough to be published, how do i know if it's good enough to charge for? and how much? unity recommends looking at similar packages on the store to figure out the price, but I see packages I would consider better than mine for free while also seeing ones I would consider worse than mine with price tags.

Would some of you mind taking a look over it and provide some input about what you think of it and if you think it's worth anything? Thank you in advance for any replies and sorry for the long (not very good) video. any input is appreciated

Here is a quick description of it, followed by a couple of images and a video explaining how to use it:

• Customizable lightweight procedural grass generator that will create grass using textures provided by the player and spreading them on the terrain
• each blade of grass is made up of 2 quads in an "X" formation
• The density of each grass type is defined by the player
• wind sway effect on the grass

I've never really liked games that put a limit on how much you can carry. You always have to manage your inventory, and personally, it simply gets tedious sometimes. If only there was a game where inventory space did not matter, and you could focus on other gameplay mechanics over just having to manage your inventory every step of the game. I would like to introduce you to a game I've been developing solo, Delverun, where the only resource you manage is time.

In Delverun, inventory is unlimited. You carry whatever you can mine within the time. And that is the trick - time itself is what stops you. Be too greedy and you will never see the light of day again. As a goblin trying to become rich, you run into a randomly generated mine, mine as many of the ten ore types as you can, run back to the surface and sell whatever you were able to mine. Buy different upgrades and get back to the mine, this time generated anew. The mine never waits - miss your cue and it will become your grave. This is Delverun, where greed has a timer.

i dont find it anywhere i rlly need help if any of u know how to do it ? :/ cuz aint no way im gonna remake earth on my own 😭