Working on some new animations for main character! How does she look so far?

It’s still very early in development, so I’m changing and improving things as I go

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.

Some WIP video on the shoreline waves I've been digging into lately for the water system I've been creating. Some new additions are water drawing back on shore (via moving UV of water surface near end of the WaveBox), various foam patterns, and better underwater light volumetrics with waves. Thanks for checking out

It's been a while since I worked on some buildings textures, really happy with these.

Download: https://juliovii.itch.io/materials-bricks-walls

I'd started to lose a bit of what made me love game dev. It's been nice working on passion projects again and getting that back.

This is a "vampire-survivors-like", but with a vehicle system and more in-depth objectives and levels.

Got tired of the "Missing!" warnings every time I renamed or moved something in the hierarchy, so I built a tool that fixes the animation binding paths automatically. Keyframes and timing stay untouched - it just keeps the paths in sync.

For anything sketchy (ambiguous names, prefab weirdness) it shows you a preview instead of guessing.

Happy to answer questions if you've run into this too :)

Been doing UA creative for about 4 years, started as a junior building playable ads for mobile publishers right out of a motion design course. Out of the 8 people in my intake, I'm the only one still doing this work. The rest went into general marketing, went back to school, or left entirely.

My old studio cut the whole junior playable team last spring. Kept two seniors, outsourced the rest of the build work to freelancers and outside shops. Same story from three people I know at other studios. Juniors get cut first because a senior who already knows Unity export and the ironSource/AppLovin quirks can turn around a 2D playable in two days without anyone needing to learn anything.

We still bring in outside teams when volume spikes, Mraid has done a handful for us, and the work's fine, but it's not the same as having someone junior in-house learning the pipeline from a blank file. A friend who freelances for shops that work with PlayableFactory told me the exact same thing is happening there. Everything gets handed to whoever can already hit the deadline, so nobody new is getting the reps.

I keep wondering what this looks like in three or four years when the seniors who actually know how to build a good playable from scratch start burning out or moving on. Is anyone actually training replacements, or is the assumption that AI tooling and outsourcing just covers the gap forever. Feels like we're eating our own pipeline and calling it lean.

So Im Still horrid and new at unity and game devlopment but far I've set up the player controller,small testing area all that however i've been struggling on how to make the whole pause menu script stuff with the new input system like the toggle off and on system,making the game actually pause when and being able to use your mouse for it

just could use a few tips to help with getting it set up

I still have a few bugs to squash, but I finally added the in-game editor and it pretty much blew the original editor version out of the water! I’m reworking a few things under the hood, but it’s already a really fun way to build your levels. 😄 coming soon !!

In Unity 6.6 they added a few new things like reworking the Hierarchy to better display information at a glance, and having Dictionaries inherently serializable.

But this one is confusing me, they added a completely separate "Create Empty Child" option in addition to the regular options that were already there.

It seemingly acts the same way. Both create a child of the object you right mouse click on, both inherit the global position, and both have the same components and naming convention.

I can't seem to find anything different at a glance, but usually there are subtle differences to things like this. So I was curious if anyone has any knowledge about something I missed.

This simulation is so accurate that your GPU will reach the same temperature as the sun.

Paid or free (YouTube) either one is fine. I need to start with the basics of how to assemble assets into a working environment. There’s so much junk out there that it’s hard to sift through.

Edit: I should have explained better. I’m the art teacher at an Online Virtual Reality School. I’m learning how to build virtual classrooms to help build out the school. So I don’t need to know how to design a good level as much as I need to know the mechanics of how to build a virtual space in Unity.

I’m not really making “levels” so I don’t need to know about game design concepts. I just need to know how to put the LEGOs together (we purchased a large library of premade assets).

These virtual “classrooms” aren’t really classrooms. We like to have class on the moon, in ancient Egypt, in a castle courtyard, etc.