Category: Tutorial
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Everything You Need to Know About LEDs
Many game developers are easily scared by electronics. Even if Arduino has shifted most of the workload on its software side, there are applications which still need a good knowledge of circuitry. This post will teach how to use LEDs, from the most basic model to the most advanced one: LEDs are perfect for creative projects, and they can be…
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The incredibly challenging task of sorting colours
Let’s start with something trivial: sorting numbers. Regardless of the algorithm you’ll use, real numbers are naturally ordered. Mathematically speaking, they have a total order, in the sense that you can always decide if a number is greater than another one. There is no ambiguity in this, meaning you can actually sort them, and (excluding duplicates) this sort is unique. There are other fields…
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The UGC Dilemma: post-mortem of a level editor
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It is undeniable that user generated content is getting more and more relevant for games. When a player has the power to create their own content , they engage with the game in a completely new way. But if you’re a developer, you should know that creating a proper level editor can be even more time consuming that creating the game…
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Understanding the Gaussian distribution
Randomness is so present in our reality that we are used to taking it for granted. Most of the phenomena which surround us have been generated by random processes. Hence, our brain is very good at recognising these random patterns. And it is even better at spotting phenomena that should be random but they actually aren’t. And this…
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A practical tutorial to hack (and protect) Unity games
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If there’s a term which is often misunderstood, that’s for sure hacking. When it refers to softwares, it usually gets a negative connotation which smells of piracy and copyright infringements. This post will not cover any of these topics; quite the opposite, I strongly discourage readers from taking any action which will damage (directly or indirectly) other developers. That said:…
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Console debugging in Unity made easy
One of the most interesting feature of Unity is the ability to extend its editor and standard components. This has allowed developers all around the world to create amazing extensions which dramatically improve Unity’s usability. And, in some cases, compensate for its shortages. A very intriguing feature which is not-so-well known is the ability to customise the messages in…
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How to hack any IR remote controller
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If you haven’t heard of Air Swimmers before, you probably had a miserable life. Air Swimmers are inflatable foil balloons made in the shape of fish. But what makes them really awesome is the fact that they can be remotely controlled to fly around in a room. One of my friends, Claudio, developed an obsession interest for them;…
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How to survive your first game exhibition
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Let’s be honest: successful game development is not about developing a game. Is about being able to find an audience for your game. A mistake that many independent developers are doing is to push all their resources into the actual making, leaving little to no budget for networking and marketing. Being able to build hype around your game is, in most cases, essential. You…
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Extension methods in C#
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Following the heritage of C++, C# comes with a number of powerful features which can either be used to massively improve your code …or to make it completely unreadable. In this post we’ll discuss a technique to add new methods to already existing classes. Yes, even classes you don’t have access to such as Vector3, Rigidbody and even string. Let’s introduce extension methods with…
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Enum, Flags and bitwise operators
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If you’re a game developer chances are you’re familiar with the need to describe different variations of an attribute. Whether it’s the type of an attack (melee, ice, fire, poison, …) or the state of an enemy AI (idle, alerted, chasing, attacking, resting, …) you can’t escape this. The most naive way of implementing this is…