News

A fairly quiet week for Unity this week. No doubt we’ll see some exciting stuff coming in this month’s upcoming VR themed events.

A brief schedule:

• 4th October: Google Daydream development announcement.
• 5th-7th October: Oculus Connect conference.
• 12th – 13th October: Steam Dev Days

Some or all of these events will have some Unity related announcements, so watch this space for the usual tl;dr summary.

I’m away on holiday for the next fortnight, so the next issue will be out on the 14th of October.

Teaching Unity to Non-Programmers: Playground Project

Amazing project by Ciro Continisio at Unity on using Unity as a tool to teach children the concepts of making games. The framework Ciro has created could easily form the basis of a teaching program for kids to learn how to get into game dev (and programming/logic concepts in general).

Of particular note are the use of custom inspectors to make things dead-simple to use in Unity. Ciro has essentially created a drag an drop game making framework out of components and custom inspectors. Really inspiring work.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/09/20/teaching-unity-to-non-programmers-playground-project/

Unity Tips

Unity: make your lists functional with ReorderableList

In-depth article on custom inspector creation using the little-known UnityEditorInternal namespace functionality.

As noted in the article, this stuff isn’t intended to be public api, so be aware:

Though UnityEditorInternal namespace is public, it seems to be intended for Unity Team internal use (hence the name), it is not documented and might change in future versions of Unity.

That said, the functionality you can add by using in this case the ReorderableList is really useful when writing a custom inspector.

http://va.lent.in/unity-make-your-lists-functional-with-reorderablelist/

Code

Basic 2D Procedural Generation

First part in a series on procedural generation in Unity. This article takes you through the first principles of creating a 2d rougelike dungeon generator.

https://duffyboyo.com/basic-2d-procedural-generation-unity3d/

Closed Source Engines are a Big Risk

Very insightful article from Stephanie Hurlburt (ex. Oculus and Unity) discussing how Unity being a black box can be a liability for your project as you push up against the fringes of what is possible outside of fairly standard usage. Anyone who has tried to hack the internal rendering in a Unity project (e.g. to tweak the shadow system, for example), or has written any native code plugins that need to play nice with Unity’s rendering subsystem will recognise this.

http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/9/16/closed-source-engines-are-a-big-risk

Graphics

Lokel Digital – Blender to Unity modelling and animation

40 page eBook going into detail on modelling, texturing, rigging and animating a simple worm character and the workflow from Blender to Unity.

https://www.lokeldigital.com/blog/blender-to-unity-modelling-and-animating/

Video

Creating a Game Environment in Blender and Unity

Part 2 in the series by Darrin Lile on creating an apartment environment in Blender for use in Unity. This video covers blocking out the walls and basic layout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6wKWl5xFts

Game Design

The Making of Lemmings

The story behind the classic puzzle game that rocketed DMA Design game studios into orbit. They would later go on to create a small title named Grand Theft Auto.

https://readonlymemory.vg/the-making-of-lemmings/

Game Dev

Build a Game Using Unity 3D

This course has just started on coursera:

This Specialization covers the theoretical and practical foundations of video game production using the Unity 3D game engine. The Specialization is taught by faculty at Michigan State University with over fifty years of combined experience building games and teaching game production. Michigan State University is one of the top-rated game design and development programs in North America

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/game-development

And Finally…

Learn from my errors!

When keyboard shortcuts collide. Oops…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/53tbkg/learn_from_my_errors/