Unity3D *

We are the Arcane Gaming development team, developing games since 2021. As of now, we have two major projects: Fanbattle and Suetologia. The time has come for us to take part in the Ludum Dare gaming hackathon for the first time.

One of the common tasks that both beginners and experienced game designers face is describing a large amount of content to pass its parameters to the engine. This is not an easy task, given that it is very difficult to find materials on the technical aspects of game design. Well, let’s figure out how to transfer data to the engine.

The title of the article is a question I was asked in an interview for a Middle position. In this article, we will look at Unity coroutines, what they are, and at the same time we will capture the topic of Enumerator \ Enumerable in C # and a little secret of foreach. The article should be very useful for beginners.

In this article, we will look at a way to give the user the ability to upload any files, such as textures. And let's touch on the topic of launching JS functions from C# within Unity. As a result, we will get a script that, by calling just one function, will open a window for selecting files.

So you want to learn more about game engines and write one yourself? That's awesome! To help you on your journey, here are some recommendations of C++ libraries and dependencies that will help you hit the ground running.

This is the translation of my article about ECS. Original (in Russian).

ECS (Entity Component System) is an architectural pattern used in game development.

In this article, I am going to describe some of the general principles of ECS frameworks' inner workings and some of the problems I have faced during the development of my own.

When I first started learning about ECS everything seemed wonderful, but only in theory. I needed some real practice to make sure that all that they were saying about ECS was true.

I’ve tried different frameworks with different engines and programming languages. Mostly it was the gorgeous EnTT framework that I used with the Godot engine and LeoECS with Unity. I haven’t tried Unity’s native ECS from DOTS because it was rather unpolished at the time I was starting.

After a while, I got enough practical experience with ECS but it was still unclear to me how all this magic works under the hood. There are a few good blogs about ECS development (https://skypjack.github.io/ from the author of EnTT and https://ajmmertens.medium.com/ from the author of Flecs) but none of them gave me enough understanding about how they are implemented. So eventually, following Bender’s example, I decided that I’m gonna make my own ECS =)

So, I finally found a moment to write a bit about how we created the water for TReload. Our basic goal was to flood all of the levels with acid - a lot of acid, as the flooded area is massive :) Here’s one of the results which we got out of this process:

Hey everyone! I represent a game studio without a name, and the project we’re working on goes by the technical name of "CGDrone". I started writing this article earlier today, having tortured myself for ages with sketches, colours, algorithms and correcting bugs in rotations based on quaternions (the last one just about finished me off). You can probably understand I needed a break.

I’ve often come across stories people have posted online about how they made their game, the difficulties they faced, and the result they achieved at the end. Likewise, our team has its own story, and I’d like to share a bit about it.

Major players in the Chinese app market are joining forces to take on the almighty Google Play store. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo are reported to launch the Global Developer Service Alliance (GDSA), a platform allowing Android developers to publish their apps in the partnering stores from one upload.

The GDSA is expected to launch in nine countries—including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam—although paid app support may vary across the regions. Canalys’ Nicole Peng explains the wide reach of this alliance:

By forming this alliance each company will be looking to leverage the others’ advantages in different regions, with Xiaomi’s strong user base in India, Vivo and Oppo in Southeast Asia, and Huawei in Europe. 

The Chinese Mobile RPG: the Genre of Giants.

Chinese RPGs make up 56% of the top 500 grossing iOS games in China. According to data gathered in 2019 by Game Refinery’s Joel Julkunen. Let’s take a look at the genre and some important points for game developers and RPG enthusiasts to consider Chinese Mobile RPGs.

RPG or role-playing game is a game where the player plays as a character, often the main character, in a fictional game world.

Introduction

Each game has data that game-designers work with. In RPG there is a database of items, in match-3 — the cost in the crystals of tools from the store, in action — hit points, for which medical kit heals.

There are many ways to store such data — someone stores it in tables, in XML or JSON files that edit with their own tools. Unity provides its own way — Scriptable Objects (SO), which I like because you don't have to write your own editor to visualize them, it's easy to make links to the game's assets and to each other, and with Addressables this data can be easily and conveniently stored off-game and updated separately.

In this article I would like to talk about my SODatabase library, with which you can conveniently create, edit and use in the game (edit and serialize) scriptable objects.

You've optimized all of the low-hanging fruits of your game. Except that you didn't. You missed a sneaky, non-so-obvious spot: optimizing your Unity Scene Hierarchy.

What's the crack with the hierarchy now?

I want to show you something.

In this article series, I will talk about how and why we decided to create our own solution for import of Flash animation to Unity, and about optimization techniques and internal workings of the plug-in. I also have lots of other fascinating stuff to tell about: internals of the SWF format, special features of the Unity editor extension and general matters of animation. You'll find all that inside!

It's a story on how to write a plugin for Unity Asset Store, take a crack at solving the well-known isometric problems in games, and make a little coffee money from that, and also to understand how expandable Unity editor is. Pictures, code, graphs and thoughts inside.