June, 2020

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How To Know When to Pivot on Your Board Game Design

Brand Game Development

A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” I got a lot of responses, and two of them were about knowing when to pivot during a game design project. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post. Need help on your board game?

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How to Analyze the Performance Cost of Your Unity Shaders

The GameDev Guru

In this post, you will learn how to analyze your unity shader complexity in numbers so your game can finally stop being fragment bound.

Shaders 130
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Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

Mircosoft Game Dev

As work progresses on Godot 4.0 at a steady pace, a new and novel method of creating full-scene global illumination has been added in the master branch. SDFGI. SDFGI stands for Signed Distance Field Global Illumination. It means this technique makes heavy use of Signed Distance Fields (an euclidean distance based representation of the signed distance function of a grid) to create this lighting.

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Supercell’s Battle Pass Clash: A Tale of Two Economies

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.  Since Fortnite’s popularization of the battle pass system, almost every game company has considered incorporating a similar monetization feature into their games. Unfortunately, the copy+paste mentality of the games industry has failed to fully comprehend the situational context of how and when to implement battle pass successfully.

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Lifetime Value

The Knights of Unity

Lifetime Va… What Exactly is it? LTV. Lifetime Value. We should be able to easily determine what it is and know what it can be used for. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. LTV is one of the most important metrics, often called the king of metrics. This is one of the pillars for creating and developing mobile games. Without it, the game would probably not be so well thought out, which could badly affect the return on investment (ROI).

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The Kristala Dev Blog - Issue #18

Astral Clock Tower Studios

Welcome back to the riveting, the joy-inducing, the awe-inspiring Kristala dev blog! We're coming to you live and direct with Issue #18 and we can confidently say.it's gonna be good. But before we dive into the real meat and potatoes of the development for this sprint, we wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some of the heavy events that are currently affecting our world.

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Mesh Baking Your Assets (With Ian Deane)

The GameDev Guru

Today, I had the pleasure to interview Ian Deane, the developer behind Mesh Baker. This famous Unity asset lets you drastically reduce your draw calls so your game runs at substantially higher frame-rate. Let's see what he has to say.

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Maintenance release: Godot 3.2.2

Mircosoft Game Dev

Godot contributors released the Godot 3.2 stable branch in January 2020 as a major update to our free and open source game engine. The main development effort then moved towards our future major version, Godot 4.0 (see Godot's Devblog for a preview of some things to come). But Godot 4.0 is still a long way off, and in the meantime we want to provide the best support possible to all Godot users, so the 3.2 branch is worked on in parallel and receives minor updates to fix bugs, improve usability a

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Game and UA Teams That Work Together, Grow Together

Deconstructor of Fun

Nebojsa Radovic. This post is written by Nebojsa “Nebo” Radovic , who’s an experienced mobile marketing professional who currently heading the user acquisition for N3TWORK’s Scale Platform. Prior to that he worked in product and performance market at Nordeus and Machine Zone. In the last few articles, Nebo wrote about recent changes in the User Acquisition (UA) space and what is their impact on how we distribute apps , define ROAS targets and, finally set up and automate creative production.

Games 52
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Practical Use of Render Textures

The Knights of Unity

Intro. Unity Engine introduces an awesome tools to empower your game development process. And even before an era of SRPs (Scriptable Render Pipelines), there was a good amount of solid features like today’s topic: Render textures. In this post I’m going to explain to you how to use render textures in your game. Project Setup. I have created a new project in Unity 2018.4 using legacy rendering, but the features I used work in SRPs too.

Texture 52
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At the Gates – v1.4

Jon Shafer

Hey all! v1.4 is now live on Humble and the main Steam branch. As promised in my previous update there have been some big changes to diplomacy, described in detail in my previous update and summarized below in the patch notes. The new goodies are still a bit rough and no doubt there are some … Continue reading At the Gates – v1.4.

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How to Find an Audience for Your Board Game & Make Them Happy

Brand Game Development

A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” I got a lot of responses, and one of them was about how to find an audience for a board game. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

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Unity Memory Profiler: Where Are You Wasting Your Game’s Memory? (Part 2)

The GameDev Guru

Discover this neat memory map visualization mode to understand the memory layout of your game

Games 100
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Release candidate: Godot 3.2.2 RC 4

Mircosoft Game Dev

Yet another release candidate for Godot 3.2.2, including a few new bugfixes that warrant some testing before we can confidently tag it as 3.2.2-stable. I won't list all the changes in 3.2.2 again, so please refer to the 3.2.2 RC 3 blog post for details. Here's the list of changes between RC 3 and RC 4 (26 commits). Notably, here are some new fixes that need some validation testing to ensure that they don't introduce regressions: GLES2 batching: Fix texture wrapping state bug ( GH-39774 ). iOS: E

Bug 52
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Static website converter?

Grumpy Gamer

Does anyone know a good tool that can convert a dynamic website into a static website? The Thimbleweed Park blog was built using PHP and a MongoDB database and it's quite complex. The website won't ever change and I like to turn it into a static site so I can host the files somewhere else and can shut down the server. Ideally it would be a tool that you just point at the url and it scrapes the site, producing a bunch of.html files.

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Unity C#: Local Functions for Higher Safety (C# 7.0)

The GameDev Guru

How C# 7.

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Release candidate: Godot 3.2.2 RC 3

Mircosoft Game Dev

The upcoming Godot 3.2.2 is turning out to be quite feature-packed and we've been taking the time to iterate with four beta snapshots and two release candidates (RC). This new RC 3 build fixes a couple recent regressions. It's now considered release-ready, so unless new regressions are reported in coming days, we plan to release 3.2.2-stable in a day or two.

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Release candidate: Godot 3.2.2 RC 2

Mircosoft Game Dev

The upcoming Godot 3.2.2 is turning out to be quite feature-packed and we've been taking the time to iterate with four beta snapshots. Last week saw a first release candidate (RC), and now's the second one with a couple regression fixes and more bugfixes and usability improvements. This new RC 2 build should be quite stable and we hope that many Godot 3.2.x users will give it a try and help us confirm that it's ready to take the place of the current 3.2.1 stable build.

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Release candidate: Godot 3.2.2 RC 1

Mircosoft Game Dev

The upcoming Godot 3.2.2 is turning out to be quite feature-packed and we've been taking the time to iterate with four beta snapshots before reaching a state that we're confident enough to label as release candidate. This new RC 1 build should be quite stable and we hope that many Godot 3.2.x users will give it a try and help us confirm that it's ready to take the place of the current 3.2.1 stable build.

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Godot core budget meeting report #1

Mircosoft Game Dev

The funding situation of Godot has been evolving in the past months, as we received more grants and donations, and reorganizing where the funding is going, deciding hires, etc., takes considerable time as well as requires the right timing. Because of this, we have started organizing meetings with the core Godot contributors to discuss and decide how to best allocate our available budget in the best interest of the project.

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Dev snapshot: Godot 3.2.2 beta 4

Mircosoft Game Dev

Yet another snapshot on the way to the feature-packed Godot 3.2.2! This beta 4 fixes some regressions and adds more bug fixes to make the upcoming release even better. Notably, Godot 3.2.2 is going to add 5 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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GDScript progress report: Writing a new parser

Mircosoft Game Dev

As you might be aware right now I'm currently working on revamping the GDScript compiler. After finishing the tokenizer in the last report, I've been working on the new parser. The main point to bring in this rewrite is to make a bit more "textbook-like" as mentioned in the previous article, so I split grammar production in different functions.

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Delores GOG

Grumpy Gamer

Given everything going on the America right now, I don't feel like a celebratory post about a game. So I'll do a factual one: Delores is now on GOG. If I hear one more person say "this is not who we are" I'll scream. This may not be who we want to be, but it is exactly who we are.

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Thimbleweed Park Forums are down

Grumpy Gamer

The Thimbleweed Park Forums seem to be down (or at least inconsistently down). I moved the DNS to a new server and it seems to have broken them. Top people are working on it.

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Bad Apples

Grumpy Gamer

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4 Lessons from Imhotep for Aspiring Board Game Designers

Brand Game Development

A few weeks into our long isolation, my fiancee and I played Imhotep for the first time. Yes, I know we’re just a few years behind the rest of the world in that regard. But hey, that’s what being isolated for weeks on end is for, right? In any case, we received this game as a gift from grandmother, who apparently has a really good eye for which hobby board game to buy!

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How Much You Should Spend on Board Game Manufacturing

Brand Game Development

A couple of months ago, I asked the readers of this blog to send in answers to the question “ what confuses you most about board game development ?” I got a lot of responses, and one of them was about how to find an audience for a board game. That’s what I’ll be talking about in this post. Need help on your board game? Join my community of over 2,000 game developers, artists, and passionate creators.

Games 130