It’s been 39 years since the 1980 eruption at Mt. Saint Helens. There’s plenty to see and do at the national monument – my favorite being the milky way. The best times to see the Milky Way are earlier in the year when the sky gets dark enough early in the night. If you come…
Unit Testing in Unity
I consider automated tests to be a cornerstone of building high quality software. Testing should be taken seriously in all aspects of software development and creating games in Unity should be no exception. In this tutorial I’ll focus on the unit testing aspect of test driven development (TDD). I’ve found that Unity resources and tutorials…
Unity Cloud Build Tutorial and Review
Cloud Build is a service that Unity offers that allows the automatic build, deploy, and testing of your games. I’ve been using it for over a year now and it’s one of the better solutions for continuous deployment on the Unity platform. In this tutorial I will go over steps on how to set it…
Finding World Height and Width from Camera in Unity
I saw this question pop up a few times on the forums recently so thought I’d share a quick tip on how to easily do this. The question is “How do I find the height and width in WORLD units that is visible in the current camera view”. It’s actually quite easy, here’s a quick…
Simple State Machines
Quite commonly game state machines are designed to be overly complex and hard to understand. As the game expands, they become larger and harder to follow. Somehow the game still magically works and most of the time nothing is done to simplify it. Generally most games revolve around a few states and limiting the number…
Tips That Every Indie Game Dev Should Follow
Game Development doesn’t come easy. It’s even more daunting for the indie developer. Whether you’re just starting out or you have a few titles under your belt, here are some tips that every indie game developer should follow. Some of these are more technical, while others may be more of mindset, organizational tip, or a…
Simple JSON to Unity For Object Data
In this tutorial I will go over how to easily read JSON in Unity to load data into your game. Manage your game data with JSON and load them as Unity objects at runtime. Games typically contain lots of data that apply to different game objects and behaviors. For example, there may be different items…
Data Structures For Tile Based Games
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to implement data structures for your tile-map / tile-based game. Using a grid based approach is a popular technique for many types of games, such as RPGs, board games, and RTS games. These games usually have a ‘top-down’ look, but other approaches can be tackled as well. For…
Buff System with Scriptable Objects for Unity
In this tutorial, I will show you how to create a flexible buff system for Unity using scriptable objects. We will use scriptable objects as a way to quickly create and manage buffs without having to use external data types such as xml or a text file. This lets us separate our buff data such…
Google Play Services Tutorial For Unity
Recently I have been putting the finishing touches on my next game and naturally that includes implementing Google Play Services into the app. Achievements, leaderboards, and other stats are a great way to keep your players engaged in the game and to keep things interesting. Luckily the process is pretty simple and straightforward with Unity,…