I absolutely LOVE seeing aspiring artists :)

I will say the same thing to everyone who is at this point who is truly serious about improving their artwork. I suggest picking up the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.

It's a 1 week, 4-8 hour a day book that will teach you how to see your art in a better light, and I think it will be much more useful to you than anything I could say about your work. (If you put up with the psuedoscience in the book, it's very worth it :)

So, I'll give some advice that will help after you've read it, just so I'm not leaving you dry with only a book, but I cannot stress this enough, don't do anything else until you read this book!

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From a compositional standpoint, I love it. It shows character with the pose that he has, having a large sword, not wearing anything, giant demonic wings.

From the larger perspective, you have everything you need, but I suggest really emphasizing a lot of the strong points here. Make the sword much larger, make his pose more exaggerated by making it look like his weight is truly shifted on one leg (Try copying the pose yourself and see what you can change. Take a picture if you have the option, even better have someone else take a picture)

Really emphasize that explosion in the background. Curve the wings more, and try to get them to flow with the pose, and really push out his casual attitude. Maybe even having the wings retracted could help in this :)

These are all fairly minor things in the grand scheme. I love it, so please, please keep going forward! Read the book, and what I say will make more sense. If you need any help understanding the concepts behind this stuff, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction. I really hope to see where you go with this!

Sure thing! I really don't know a lot about shaders, or I kind of did understand them a bit in terms of "This is code to run on the gpu, it's a step in the rendering pipeline and it can run in a few different ways" but I bought the kindle edition of The Unity Shaders and Effects Cookbook and it gets you started writing shaders right away pretty much as long as you can create shader files and materials in Unity and can use an image editting program like photoshop or gimp.

The weird part though is that the book seems a bit dated and they it has errors in it. If you look up the book's website the site has all the corrections which helps but between all that looking around you'll end up with some errors but the error messages were actually pretty friendly and helped me to learn. So it was a bumpy few hours but after that I can follow along in the book pretty easily and that shader is just a pieced together shader from the first chapter that I had to tweak a bit to get to work on a sprite renderer but I know I feel like if I can write a few basic shaders I can learn the rest and build them up. The book apparently goes up through post processing effects and some of the last chapters are things like creating a movie film effect.

If anyone has read and used the whole book please chime in! I'd say try out the free kindle sample and see if it's something that might be useful. But since it's dated I wouldn't recommend the physical version at $49 I'd definitely recommend the kindle for like $19.

Trailer

I posted this last month but I've since made massive updates like music, better graphics and a bunch more features that were suggested by Redditors the first time around. Anyway...

PREPARE FOR THE BEST VOICE ACTING OF ALL TIME! ...AGAIN!!

The game is an Asteroids/Motherload inspired story game and is totally free! (Ads are optional and IAPs are donations only)

It's now available on:

app store

google play

amazon store

online

I hope you'll give it a go. Have fun and know that all feedback is very much appreciated.

A lot of the balancing comes from play testing with actual players and a basic understanding of probability math.

Randomness in games can often be a fun addition because it leads to surprises and can make a boring game more interesting. But you also want to use with caution because you want your players to still feel like they are in control. Too much RNG can make people feel that the game is unfair.

Pre-built maps are good if you want people to be able to master them, and generated maps are good if you want people to think on their feet every time. Pre-built can make things predictable, whereas generated can add replayability.

As for symmetrical maps, do you mean both players start with an even playing field? If so, that's ideal for balance. If you do intend to give one player a map advantage, you'd have to properly balance the other player to have some other advantage. Imagine playing golf. The player at a disadvantage might be granted a handicap. The important thing is that both players must feel like they are treated fairly.

Edit: If you're really interested, I'd recommend The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. There's 2 excellent chapters in there about game balance that details probability math, good design, and player psychology when dealing with balancing.

These are both a part of programming outside of Unity as well. So you don't really need a Unity book.

My personal suggestion would not be to pick up something specifically aimed at Unity, instead pick up a C# book. You will learn more about the language and therefore increase your ability to code in Unity. You will also be able to write programs outside of Unity. As good as Unity can be for learning some of the basics of programming, it's tutorials barely scrape the surface of the language it uses or broader programming techniques. They are more focused on showing you features of Unity than features of the language. Having a better understanding of language and of programming in general, will allow you to do a lot more than most can in Unity. It will give you a better understanding of what you are doing as well.

Object pooling is quite simple and there are lots of free tutorials online for it. With a bit more knowledge you would probably be able to figure it out yourself, I certainly wouldn't see it as a technique to buy a book about.

Just in case you are unaware, as I was when I learnt Unity, objects are not a concept unique to Unity. They are more a feature of the language Unity uses. C# is one of many object orientated languages. Before jumping into design patterns it would be a good idea to get a good grasp of the pillars of OOP and how to design objects. This is the book I learnt from https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Thought-Process-Developers-Library/dp/0321861272/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491986003&sr=8-1&keywords=object+oriented+design

However there are plenty of tutorials on the web about OOP as well.

There are plenty of design pattern books, many of the general design patters apply to games as well. You can't really recommend specific design patterns. The patterns you use will often depend on you or the people you work with. The goal of design patterns is to make your code more manageable by following conventions of design. However, if using a design pattern is making your code harder to understand then it is not fulfilling it's purpose. There are a few that are particularly good for particular parts of a program, but most of them come down to personal preference and what best suits you and the program you are creating.

Derek Banas has a series on youtube where he explains most of the popular patterns in a short amount of time.

To get your head around C# you could speed-read a book. This one would cover a lot of C# with examples. Learn C# in One Day and Learn It Well: https://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Hands-Project-Coding-Project-ebook/dp/B016Z18MLG As you have programming knowledge already, it will probably be easier for you to relate some concepts between the languages, that is why I said speed-read.

You said you like hands on approach and I agree it's the best way to learn, so you should continue to try things yourself. My advice is if you feel like you're copy/pasting a lot in tutorials to individually go through each line to learn what is happening. To do this, you might have to constantly refer to the documentation or even Google if documentation examples don't cut it. Once you understand the lines/block, add in comments for yourself. EDIT: I would also watch a few tutorials on the same thing, e.g. character movement, to see the differences in how things can be done and understand the benefits/drawbacks.

This book might also be a handy Unity/C# reference for you: https://www.amazon.com/Unity-2018-Cookbook-recipes-development/dp/1788471903. If you want to make something in Unity with C# and aren't sure where to start, it can offer some guidance.

I think you have an advantage coming into the C# world while knowing another language. However, I get that C# looks pretty hard vs. Python! Good luck.

I love doing procedural maps but it is an evolving art (Especially for me). I recommend that you create an interface (Programming, not user) such as IMapProvider that returns the data your game needs for a new map. That way you can iterate and improve your map generation code to your hearts content and just swap new ones in without any hassle.

Check out articles such as those on Rogue Basin and the book Mazes for Programmers.

I started with a relatively simple generator that generates a number of rooms then connects close ones with corridors until all rooms are connected. It works but is slow (Limiting map size). Later I created a new generator based on the Mazes for Programmers book that is several orders of magnitude faster and more flexible.

Also look at the blogs of people in r/roguelikedev such as the creators of spelunky and cogmind

My learning style might be a bit different, and I don't know what your budget is, but I got the book https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Game-Development-Unity-Hands/dp/0321957725 and was pleasantly surprised. Book does leave out a lot of crucial details, but walks you through creating a 2d platformer game. Kind of forces you to figure out or learn certain aspects on your own, which allows you to find and use unity resources better. Book is structured so that if you follow through with the book, you'll at least have a start of a game by the time you're through with it, and just have to make modifications on top of that to continue.

Hello. I started learning programming and unity recently and I just finished this card matching game. I am aware that it looks like crap at the moment but my priority was to make it work.

Now the code works but I feel the scripts could be organized better. I'm also not sure if I named stuff properly. I don't want to get bad coding habits in the beginning. Is there some sources you can recommend for these topics?

I read about the half of Robert C. Martin's book Clean Code and I liked it very much. I wanted to read all of it but it got very complicated.

I want to learn good practices for using unity. For example when I first started using unity I thought the main camera object can carry the script for the general tasks but then I learned it is better to make an empty game object and make it carry that script. I want to learn more about stuff like this.

1. Think of a simple game you would like to recreate (Flappy Bird or something similar).
   
2. Break the game down into the simplest components - a background, a player sprite, getting keyboard input, moving the camera, moving the player, etc.
   
3. Figure out the bare minimum you need to make the game do something (e.g. move the player up and down via keyboard input), and break that down into small pieces - put the player sprite on screen, detect vertical input, move the player according to the input.
   
4. Do the things in step 3, then think of the next thing to add - e.g. moving the player and camera.
   
   
   http://unity.grogansoft.com/complete-unity-pong-clone-tutorial-for-beginners/
   
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Build-your-First-Unity-Game-ebook/dp/B01M9EAHP2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1503457354&sr=8-4&keywords=first+unity+game
   
   
   For inspiration, play games, do stuff in Unity, practice. Some of my best ideas come from making mistakes in Unity and turning those mistakes into game mechanics. Sometimes I'll play a game and wish something was done differently - so I do it differently for my game.

In my book, Unity Game Development Blueprints, I do a 3D sidescrolling game using tiles, but in reality it is built a lot like a 2D game is (I use it to teach the transition from 2D to 3D). I do it entirely within Unity and actually build an in-game level editor so players can actually make their own levels. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIGCko35e4&list=UUv9Q10qPPwc5BC5rblTedVA

May be useful. If you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/Unity-Game-Development-Blueprints-Doran-ebook/dp/B00PITJRQ6/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Here are some good books I recommend to you.

They can be read on the go as well, though they are mostly project based, therefore they require you to do the projects on the computer while you are reading. But of course you can read it anywhere and then later when you are near the computer, you can attempt to recreate the little games they show. (thats what I did with the first book on this list)

​

• Jonathon Manning & Paris Buttfield-Addison: Mobile Game Development with Unity: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere
  
• Joe Hocking: Unity in Action: Multiplatform game development in C#
  
• Ashley Godbold: Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition
  
• Dr. Edward Lavieri: Getting Started with Unity 2018 - Third Edition: A Beginner's Guide to 2D and 3D game development with Unity
  
• Lauren S. Ferro & Francesco Sapio: Unity 2017 2D Game Development Projects: Create three interactive and engaging 2D games with Unity 2017

Version 1.1.2 [PROD]

Google Play Store - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.appapps.athens

Amazon App Store - http://www.amazon.com/AppApps-Air-Evade/dp/B00UMN47AO


Patch Notes:

• Added weather effects to multiple levels.
  
• Complete overhaul of code base for performance improvement purposes. (During testing, we've been seeing an incredible performance boost, especially on older devices)
  
• Facebook and Twitter backend has been laid out. Will be useable next version.
  
• Players experiencing major FPS issues, including Nexus 6 users, should see an increase in performance.
  
• Reconfigured visual shaders for quality of life improvements.
  
• Tweaked all difficulties using feedback given from the community.
  
• Tweaked (lessened frequency of) Ad pop-ups.

I recommend you get familiar with C# first, before even touching anything in Unity. Trying to tackle both programming and the engine at the same time is a lot of information; it's easy to get overwhelmed with just one of those things, let alone both.


I learned with this book


If you're adamant about video tutorials Brackeys seemed pretty good

If anyone's interested in checking the game out, it is currently live on the following platforms:


Android Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.idz.snakes.and.ladders.dice.board.games/

iOS App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snakes-and-ladders-games/id1450597305/

Amazon Store: https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Ladders-Games-Classic-Family/dp/B07NDBTQFB/

This book will help you: Https://amzn.com/0321861272

My book was released at the end of December. Goes through making a 2D game from start to finish.
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-2D-Game-Development-Unity/dp/0321957725