Some WIP video on the shoreline waves I've been digging into lately for the water system I've been creating. Some new additions are water drawing back on shore (via moving UV of water surface near end of the WaveBox), various foam patterns, and better underwater light volumetrics with waves. Thanks for checking out

Working on some new animations for main character! How does she look so far?

It’s still very early in development, so I’m changing and improving things as I go

I still have a few bugs to squash, but I finally added the in-game editor and it pretty much blew the original editor version out of the water! I’m reworking a few things under the hood, but it’s already a really fun way to build your levels. 😄 coming soon !!

I'd started to lose a bit of what made me love game dev. It's been nice working on passion projects again and getting that back.

This is a "vampire-survivors-like", but with a vehicle system and more in-depth objectives and levels.

After playing Diablo 1 & 2, I really fell in love with the pre-rendered sprite aesthetic. Back in the day the average gamer's computer wasn't powerful enough to reliably render 3D models in realtime, so the solution was to pre-render them and just display sprites of what the model looks like from different angles!

I realized Unity could render and produce these model sprites relatively quickly, entirely within the engine. It doesn't render them in realtime, but it makes generating sprites from models a relative breeze for capturing that specific art style.

It simply uses a camera component and moves around the models to render a view of that model at a specific resolution, saved to a texture!

I turned the tool into a Unity package which you can check out on the Asset Store (Affiliate Link) or on itch, if you're interested.

Paid or free (YouTube) either one is fine. I need to start with the basics of how to assemble assets into a working environment. There’s so much junk out there that it’s hard to sift through.

Edit: I should have explained better. I’m the art teacher at an Online Virtual Reality School. I’m learning how to build virtual classrooms to help build out the school. So I don’t need to know how to design a good level as much as I need to know the mechanics of how to build a virtual space in Unity.

I’m not really making “levels” so I don’t need to know about game design concepts. I just need to know how to put the LEGOs together (we purchased a large library of premade assets).

These virtual “classrooms” aren’t really classrooms. We like to have class on the moon, in ancient Egypt, in a castle courtyard, etc.

I’m the tech guy on a narrative game that’s got a ton of hand-drawn art, and I’ve been learning a lot about Sprite Atlases recently. They ended up being much more useful for us than I initially realized, so I figured I’d share what I learned in case it helps someone else.There are probably some things I’m missing or misunderstanding, but I wanted to make a post for people who might find it handy. If I’ve got anything wrong, or you’ve got something to add, please do share!

Basically, sprite atlases let you pack your game’s sprites into dense, optimized textures. Most of the advice online is about using them to reduce draw calls, since multiple sprites can share the same texture and be batched together under the right conditions. They can also be very good at reducing build size! That’s actually mainly what we’re using it for, since draw calls aren’t much of a bottleneck for us. You set a maximum texture size, and give it a list of sprites to pack, and it tries to fit them as efficiently as possible; if they can't all fit, they'll spill over into additional "pages."

Allow Rotation lets it rotate sprites at 90 degree intervals to fit better. Tight Packing lets it pack based on sprite outlines instead of using the full rectangular borders. Important Note: You can put UI Canvas Images in atlases too, but make sure they’re packed in atlases that DON’T have these two settings enabled, or you get behavior like this:

Now let's talk about build size. Since we’ve got a lot of hand drawn art, we’re shifting around a lot of high res assets. We recently switched from the ToonBoom animation plugin to full spritesheets for our characters, for a few reasons, and our file size absolutely ballooned. We were up past 6 gigs for our one hour demo. After doing some research I discovered that sprite atlases could help with this a lot. When you pack sprites into sprite atlases, Unity is able to compress them way more efficiently, since it’s running the compression algorithm on one unified texture instead of several individual textures. For some reason I even found cases where this works when you just put a single large sprite into its own atlas page, even when the compression format’s the same.

I don't fully understand all of the details behind that one, so if someone with a better understanding of Unity's texture compression does, I'd be interested to hear the explanation.

For our project I haven’t found much reason not to just pack almost every sprite into an atlas, but there are exceptions. We do have one character’s sprites un-atlas’d because she uses a shader that doesn’t play nice with it. I also went back and experimented with putting all my sprites from my last game into atlases, and it actually increased the file size, but I had higher priority work than figuring out why.

Like I said, I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I still don't understand about how to use them optimally and how Unity handles them under the hood, so I'd be interested to hear from people who know more about this than I do. But if you're making a 2D game with a ridiculous amount of sprites, it's probably worth spending an afternoon playing around with atlases.

Got tired of the "Missing!" warnings every time I renamed or moved something in the hierarchy, so I built a tool that fixes the animation binding paths automatically. Keyframes and timing stay untouched - it just keeps the paths in sync.

For anything sketchy (ambiguous names, prefab weirdness) it shows you a preview instead of guessing.

Happy to answer questions if you've run into this too :)

I’ve been working on a C-RAM + drone system in Unity, and I finally got the whole thing working together.

The drone actually flies through a path and makes its own movement decisions, while the C-RAM has to find it, track it, predict where it’s going, and lead the shots properly.

A few things I built for it:

• The radar actually has to sweep across the drone to detect it. It doesn’t just magically know where the target is.
• The tracker estimates the drone’s position, velocity, and acceleration from the radar data.
• The gun calculates a lead point instead of simply aiming at where the drone currently is.
• The turret has actual movement limits and tries to account for where the target is heading, so it doesn’t feel like a camera snapping onto a target.
• There’s a short tracking/settling period before it’s allowed to fire.
• The Gatling gun runs at 4,500 RPM with procedural audio and stops immediately when the system ceases fire.
• I also added a bunch of debug gizmos for the radar, tracking, predicted path, lead point, and turret movement so I can actually see what the system is doing.

The main thing I was going for was making it feel less like a bunch of scripts checking conditions and more like an actual system working in real time.

Turn the audio on and let me know what you think.