Category: Game Development
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Unity Tip: Fixing Unity hanging at startup.
An infrequent, but potentially catastrophic problem that can occur is Unity unable to start up and open your project. I was helping a friend debug this exact problem yesterday. I have a checklist of things that I will generally do to debug the issue and see what the problem is: But First Before you do…
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Whoaaaa…trippy! Creating a Whirlpool Shader
I saw the whirlpool in the new hearthstone gameplay video and I was hypnotized by it for some reason. I figured this is probably a shader…but how does it work? I was determined to see how. My final result was this: How does it work? My shader doesn’t have the additional layers of transparency and fading that…
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Games 101: Coding Gameplay
Let’s talk gameplay. What’s the difference between, say, ‘gameplay’ programming and other programming? If you are developing a game, you might need to make lots of things: shaders, engine, lighting, modeling, animation, in-app purchases, banhammers, web sites, the list goes on. But these things do not a game make. Gameplay makes a game. Gameplay is what you…
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Project Search & Replace: Free Version, More Videos, More Features
In an attempt to shamelessly get Project Search & Replace into people’s hands, I’ve created a free version: Project Search. Free Version: Project Search Like its bigger brother, Project Search allows you to search across an entire project but is feature limited: Replace is not available. Search Scope is not available. Search while the application…
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Stupid Prefab Tricks
As I work on my Project Search & Replace tool I get to learn a lot about the internals of Unity. I’m currently adding the ability to search and replace prefab instances to the tool(edit: now out in v1.1!), and I’ve also written a free utility for prefabs (scroll down to the Prefab Hierarchy Inspector or check it…
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Why Git is Not Good for Games.
This is a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a while, mainly so that I can refer to it when someone can’t understand why I use SVN. So Git. Its the Golden Hammer of version control. Its really good for making Twitter so its great for games, right? It seems people are taught…
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Howto: Remapping the Animation Hierarchy in Unity
Working with animations in Unity has some quirks. Sometimes I will make an animation and I animated the wrong object. I might have realized I want to animate the container for an object, or accidentally animated the parent when I wanted to animate the child (this happens more often than I’d like to admit!). Unity does…
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Games 101: Data Structures in Games
Frequently people’s first foray into programming is in games. Sometimes developers come from other disciplines such as design or QA. Frequently I see the same programming mistakes occur due to a lack of understanding of basic data structures. I’ve made them, it seems everyone makes them. So I hope to spread some data structure love (using C#/Unity…