April, 2020

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6 Ways to Find Play-Testers for Your New Board Game

Brand Game Development

Play-testing is the most important part of board game design. It’s how you turn rough, raw ideas into polished, ready-to-play games. It’s also brutally difficult. Play-testing is a labor of love, and sometimes it’s hard to even find play-testers in the first place! This is a follow-up on last week’s post, How to Turn Your Ideas Into Reality.

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Unity GPU Optimization: Is Your Game. Vertex Bound?

The GameDev Guru

Is your game rendering more geometry than your GPU can handle? Here, let me show you a few steps to check if your geometry is causing a performance bottleneck on your players' GPU.

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Long-Term Retention - Why D180 is the New D30

Deconstructor of Fun

This post is written by Oleg Yakubenkov , CEO @ GoPractice. Oleg has built his data-driven product management expertise working on some of the biggest games as well as some of the biggest social platforms in the World. GoPractice is an online simulator course that will give you hands-on-like experience working on an ambitious product and making decisions based on real data in actual analytics systems.

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Vulkan progress report #7

Mircosoft Game Dev

It's been three months since a Vulkan progress report! I know you guys missed them, so I made sure to work extra hard to have something nice to make up. It feels great to be back to doing graphics programming after two months refactoring the core engine. So, here are the things that were worked on during April 2020! See other articles in this Godot 4.0 Vulkan series: Vulkan progress report #1.

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Visualising Complex Systems

Sky Betting and Gaming Technology

It’s common practice to collect a multitude of metrics from our builds, tests, releases and running applications. Typically we use dashboard tools to visualise these metrics creating a plethora of interrelated graphs and charts to enable us to quickly review performance, spot anomalies and monitor the health of our system components. Although we may have detailed knowledge of individual components of the system, can dashboards alone give us the ability to understand how those components and the

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v1.4 Diplomacy Design Plan

Jon Shafer

Hey all, I’ve decided to post my design plan for the diplomacy changes coming in v1.4 to give you an idea of what’s on the horizon. Diplomacy is a tricky feature which requires a lot of playtesting to evaluate and so this is a fairly long-term project. When launching a new project I like to … Continue reading v1.4 Diplomacy Design Plan.

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The Game Performance Pillars: The Start of a Journey

The GameDev Guru

What's going on with The Gamedev Guru? What can you expect in the upcoming months in the game performance scene? Let's see what I have planned for you.

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Roblox & Beyond: The Problem with Game Creator Platforms

Deconstructor of Fun

This analysis is a part of Deconstructor of Fun’s Digest newsletter. You can sign up to the newsletter at the bottom of this text. Roblox’s massive success has spawned a number of teams to try and follow suit by creating their own next-gen game creation platforms, but how likely will these efforts succeed given the peculiarities of Roblox’s demographic?

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Announcing the 2020 showreel!

Mircosoft Game Dev

The showreel for 2020 is up! As every year, more and more quality submissions fall in our hands, making the selection job very difficult. This year was not the exception, as we had had a record submission amount (over 200) so, this time, several core contributors had to take the work of ranking and voting them to decide which would make up the final reel.

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Nerd Alert

Grumpy Gamer

Crafting Interpreters. I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. As a fairly extreme introvert, all this stay-at-home social distancing isn't much change for me. Most restaurants are offering "no contact" delivery where they place the food at your door, ring the doorbell, then leave. I like this. I hope this practice continues after the apocalypse.

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Various details about Handles

The Astronauts

I wanted to fix one thing about Unity editor Handles, and accidentally ended up fixing some more. So here’s more random things about Handles than you can handle! What I wanted to fix For several years now, I wanted built-in tool (Move/Scale/Rotate) handle lines to be thicker than one pixel. One pixel might have been fine when displays were 96 DPI, but these days a pixel is a tiny little non-square.

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The Top 6 Board Game Components to Add to Your Game

Brand Game Development

Board games have been wildly successful over the last decade. In a world with abundant entertainment options, including video games, it might seem strange that a throwback hobby has done so well. Much of this success comes from the physical presence provided by board game components. There is a lot of debate online about which components are the best.

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What's Hiding In Your Unity Asset Bundles?

The GameDev Guru

Did you know Unity can silently duplicate your assets in your bundles? Avoid this and wasting more money in CDNs with the Unity Asset Bundle Browser.

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Help Us Fund a New Yomi Card Game

Sirlin

For the last few years, I’ve thought about my tabletop games Puzzle Strike and Yomi. I have not been thinking about new editions of those games, but rather entirely new games that are inspired by those games. I’ve done a whole lot of work on that, but I really need your help at this point. The status right now is that my patrons on Patreon have access to all of the new Puzzle Strike-inspired game’s materials.

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Dev snapshot: Godot 3.2.2 beta 1

Mircosoft Game Dev

After refining our Godot 3.2 release with bug fixes in 3.2.1 last month , it's time to integrate some of the new features that didn't make it into the 3.2 merge window but have been further developed and backported since. Notably, Godot 3.2.2 is going to add three major features: C# support for the iOS platform , courtesy of Ignacio ( neikeq ). 2D batching for the GLES2 renderer , thanks to lawnjelly and Clay ( clayjohn ).

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April Fools' 2020

Grumpy Gamer

For sixteen years now, Grumpy Gamer has been 100% April Fools' joke free. I'm a little disappointed the gaming press hasn't caught onto this. You'd think it would be a good human interest story. Oh well, maybe I should do a Twitch channel ranting about April Fools' day. I'm only on once a year. If there is any good to come out of this horrible COVID-19 disaster, it's that most big outlets have canceled their April Fools' pranks.

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“What's the worst that could happen?”: A worked example of how we deal with live incidents.

Sky Betting and Gaming Technology

I am the Principal DevOps Engineer for the Core Customer Tribe at Sky Betting & Gaming. One of my duties is to help mentor our DevOps Engineers and help them improve. One of the hardest aspects of that is helping them to deal with failed changes. We make a lot of live changes in Core Customer, and for the most part they go smoothly, but mistakes happen.

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Unity Addressables: Learning Resources for 2020+

The GameDev Guru

With so much content out there, you might be confused about where to start learning Unity addressables.

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C# progress report: iOS and signals as events

Mircosoft Game Dev

Initially and for quite some time C# was only supported in Godot on desktop platforms. In the last year we made good progress extending support to Android and WebAssembly, and now it's time to add iOS to that list as well. In this progress report I'm also introducing a new way of working with Godot signals in C#. This work is kindly sponsored by Microsoft. iOS support.

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MISSING

Grumpy Gamer

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GLES2 renderer optimization - 2D batching

Mircosoft Game Dev

While Juan ( reduz ) has been busily working on Vulkan, the rest of the rendering team have not been idle. They have been working on many bug fixes and some improvements to the OpenGL rendering in the 3.x branch. One of the most eagerly awaited 2D features has been batching of drawcalls, and it is something myself ( lawnjelly ) and Clay ( clayjohn ) have spent several weeks researching and coming up with a reasonable implementation, that should hopefully significantly increase performance in a l

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Godot 4.0 gets global and per-instance shader uniforms

Mircosoft Game Dev

Work towards the complete 4.0 feature set continues at a vibrant pace (stay tuned for the progress report at the end of the month!). Today I will discuss a new feature that most likely takes a bit more time to understand than just looking at the above image. Per instance global what? Godot shader language is one of the easiest ones to use of any engine.

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Joe Biden Is a Garbage Candidate Who Will Not Be President

Sirlin

Edit: It turns out that a once-in-hundred-years pandemic rocked the world so hard, and Trump fumbled it so badly, that that one factor lead to Biden winning by the narrowest of margins. If just 42,000 people in key states had voted the other way, Biden would have lost. But he didn’t. So the most garbage candidate on the democratic side is now the president of the United States. —- Original post: Today, Bernie Sanders dropped out of the US democratic primary election for president of the United S

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