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Asset Creation & Game Art
What are Game Assets? Game assets consist of textures, 2D sprites (which are just images); or 3D models, sound/music files, animations and other elements used to synthesize game world & its sounds. Include game’s GUI menus as well. How do they look like? Some examples Getting Free Assets There are numerous websites online that have…
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AI Decision-making & Pathfinding in Games
Path finding Techniques Most games require AI to travel to some place; as in chasing the player intelligently or just driving along the roads to some place. For this, we need an algorithm. The algorithm we will use is called A* (read A-star). it is the most common approach used in most video games. Overview…
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Math in Video Games
Reading The purpose of this text is to familiarize you about the math in games; you should not stress on this too much, as you will eventually grasp the concepts as you progress into making stuff. Most of the things discussed here are wholly or partially well-implemented in game engines such as Unity, Godot or…
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Designing your Video Game
Game design is the documentation of everything about the game before we develop it. Clear game design prevents disorder during development & leads to success. Even if you are working solo or in a small team, it is a good idea to work properly on design instead of delaying your decisions until development; as we…
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Basics of Game Development
Prerequisite Basic programming skills & logic-building. GameDev in Nutshell Game development process involves coming up with an idea, thinking hard to see if its feasible, designing your game, writing story, choosing development technologies, making art, coding it, adding sounds & music, adding UI interface & publishing it. All of these elements are usually done by…
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Poisson Disk Sampling
Cover image credits: https://github.com/udit/poisson-disc-sampling Poisson disk sampling is a technique for generating random points in the given space such that the points are distributed more evenly compared to purely random sampling, and it helps to avoid clustering or large gaps between points. In my old games, I used simple noise for procedural placement of trees…
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Simulating Hydraulic Erosion of Terrain
Hydraulic erosion is a nature-based algorithm that simulates erosion caused by water on terrain. It is useful to make procedurally generated terrains look more realistic & interesting. Hydraulic Erosion Overview Water from mountains come down through slopes, forming creases along the way. This water is then accumulated as is travels, causing the formations of streams.…
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Noise Functions
In a Nutshell Noise functions are used to add variation. It is useful for making procedural oceans, terrains, forests & vegetations and so on. 1. White noise 2. Value noise 3. Perlin noise 4. Voronoi (Worley) 5. Fractal Brownian Motion White Noise White noise is one of the simplest of the noises, made up of…
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Marching Cubes Algorithm
Marching Cubes is a meshing algorithm, used to create mesh surface from a scalar field. The scalar field is just a scalar value associated with each point in a space. In simple words, visualize it as an algorithm to convert volume data into a mesh surface. This technique is often used in 3D procedural generation…
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3D Procedural World Generation
I was making my bird game & the player should be able to fly tens of kilometers to any direction, above the rich forests & deserts. There should be different species of birds flying in beautiful patterns and should interact with the world in a good way. I knew that the answer is procedural generation,…