A collection of beginner friendly tutorials for game development...
Most of my tutorials I focus on assuming people already know some basics and I take opportunities to discuss some topics that come up a little later. Part of that is because the internet is already crawling with some really good tutorials for game development. I tend to focus on Unity at the moment and that is likely what the bulk of these tutorials I list here will focus on. If I stumble across tutorials for another engine or that are engine agnostic that are worthy I will try to include them.
Tutorials Floating in the Outside of Steemit
There are a tremendous amount of tutorials that can be found on the internet for game development. This is especially true if you are using Unity as your engine. Unity has an absolutely huge a prolific community. In the past I have mostly written tutorials. Now I will share with you some of the places you can look for other worthy tutorials and if the ones I have written have been skipping steps you need then you are welcome to try these on for size.
Official Unity Tutorials
Unity Technologies has quite a number of tutorials of its own. They are high quality and you can learn a lot. If you have not had a look at them here are some links to the current tutorials. (They will deprecate older tutorials as technology improves).
Roll-a-ball tutorial
Unity tutorial list simply says "New? Start here." with this one.
Roll-a-ball tutorial
Space Shooter Tutorial
"Blast some asteroids!" - Unity short description of this tutorial says, "Expand your knowledge and experience of working with Unity by creating a simple top down arcade style shooter."
Space Shooter Tutorial
Survival Shooter tutorial
"*They mostly come at night.." - Unity technologies says, "Learn how to make an isometric 3D survival shooter game."
Survival Shooter
Tanks Tutorial
The goal of this tutorial is to create a 2 player tank game that players play using a shared keyboard.
"2-players, 1 keyboard, Tank vs Tank"
Tanks tutorial
2D Roguelike tutorial
"Procedural level Survive-em-up! - Unity technologies says, "Learn how to make a 2D Roguelike game with this project."
2D Roguelike tutorial
Procedural Cave Generation Tutorial
"Let's get spelunking" - Unity technologies says, "Learn how to create procedurally generated caverns/dungeons using cellular automata and marching squares."
Procedural Cave Generation Tutorial
2D UFO Tutorial
"New? Want to make 2D games? Start here." - Unity Technologies says, "Create a simple 2D UFO game that teaches you many of the principles of working with Unity and creating 2D games."
2D UFO Tutorial
Let's Try Assignments
"Learn to create single game mechanics" - Unity Technologies says, "In our Let's Try series of tutorials we explore popular game mechanics in standalone assignments. Instead of creating an entire game, we will focus on a single mechanic and the techniques needed to implement it."
Here are some of the listed sub-sections of this tutorial:
- Shooting with Raycasts
- "Angry Birds" style game
- 2D Catch Game
- Couch Wars: Local Multiplayer Basics
- Basic Platformer Game
- Breakout style Game
- Casual Jewel Mining Game
C# Scripting
This is a large sub-section to help you learn how to code in C#.
C# Scripting
Interface & Essentials
This is another large section that basically goes all over the interface. It takes what I did in one of my tutorials and takes it much further and in-depth.
Interface & Essentials
Best Practices
This a collection of quite a few different tips on best practices, and optimization.
Best Practices
2D Game Creation
Unity Technologies says, "Everything you need to start making 2D games in Unity."
2D Game Creation
Graphics
Unity technologies describes this section as "Everything for Lighting and Rendering in Unity." It has some pretty important information in it.
Graphics
Audio
This is similar to the graphics section but focuses on details on game audio, and also focuses on sound design.
Audio
User Interface (UI)
This section is quite important to likely every game. If you use Unity's UI system them this is what you will use to build menus, create buttons, put text on the screen and more.
User Interface(UI)
Animation
Unity Technologies describes this section as "Get things moving! All you need to start animating in Unity."
Animation
Multiplayer Networking
Unity Technologies says, "Learn to create Multiplayer Networked games with these Lessons and Assignments."
Multiplayer Networking
Physics
For this lesson the sub-title that Unity Technologies supplied is "Create some mechanical mayhem as you learn about Unity's physics options."
Physics
There are still more tutorials on the official site but, I thought the above were some of the better ones.
Other tutorials Out There
There is truly a vast amount of Unity tutorials out there on the internet. I searched and looked some over and wanted to share a few that I thought might be useful or interesting to people here. I barely scratched the surface though and if you are so inclined you should go out there and take a look yourself.
Candy Crush-Video Tutorial series
Gaming Studio Z on Youtube is making a Candy Crush style game. Here are the videos for that.
C# Scripting Tutorials
There is a truly excellent set of tutorials written by Jasper Flick from Catlike Coding. These tutorials in their native environment can be found HERE. I am going to list a few of them here, but this is barely scratching the surface... You should take a look at their site.
Build a working clock and learn a lot about C# and using it with Unity.
Construct a 3D fractal from prefabs
Object Pools
Procedural Grid
Rounded Cube
Matrices
Shader Fundamentals
Combining Textures
Creating a Hexagonal Grid
Blending Cell Colors
Elevation and Terraces
Maze
Graphs
Octahedron Sphere
I picked SOME of the tutorials from the official site of Catlike games. Each of these had many more with it and usually took it further than the tutorials I listed. The author of these also has a patreon. He makes some great tutorials.
My Tutorials
I have made quite a few different Unity related tutorials. I know it can be difficult tracking them down sometimes on Steemit so I am going to link to them now. Some tutorials are simply informative and tips. Others involve code. I do not consider them on par with the Catlike Game tutorials above. Those are some truly wonderful tutorials.
- Assets that are worthy from the asset store
- The basics - An Intro to Unity - Layout, Non-Coder, Coder
- Optimization Assets and Particle System Assets
- Coding Education Speed Boost - Coding Lesson 1 - Also my Naming Conventions
- Free Assets that people might find useful
- Coding Lesson 2 - Some of those things you learn over time
- Coding Lesson 3 - Code based texture creation - Mandelbrot Set
- Coding Lesson 4 - Coroutines
- Assets for Game Controllers and Assets for Low Poly Games
- Turing Game 1
- Turing Game 2
- Turing Game 3
- Turing Game 4
- Turing Game 5
- Obvious path to Cubic Voxels and the problem with this approach
- Cubic Voxels 1
- So you have a game idea...
- You want to make a game but can't think of a project...
@JG02 Tutorials
@JG02 has some great tutorials too. I edited my post to add links to his tutorials. If this is a topic you are interested in he appears to be someone you will likely want to follow. You can also up vote these too if you like them and did not see them before.
- Step 1 - Inspiration
- Step 2 - Parameters
- Step 3 - Brainstorm
- Step 4 - Prototyping
- Step 5 - Test
- Step 6 - Iterate
Some other Game Developer Tutorial Authors on Steemit
- @quantumanomaly - Is using Game Maker Studio, which is a nice cool twist. :)
- @behfar
- @charlie.wilson - has a large collection on programming tutorials. Good stuff. I've referenced some of his previous programming tutorials in other posts before.
- @loganarchy - from the art side and working on professional games. Some great work he has shown on steemit.
- @funnyman - making a 2D game
- @raymonjohnstone - makes dice and other gaming related posts and apps
- @thegame - I believe still trying to turn steemit itself into a game. ;)
Some of my older related posts
I was writing the occasional gamedev related post prior to the ones I listed above. I have a few older posts I will reference here.
- Game Dev Blog 001 - The influence of board game mechanics - [Wormhole Ventures]
- Game Dev Blog 002 - Prototype boardgame born from inspiration - [Wormhole Ventures]
- Game Dev Blog 003 - Prototyping on PC leads to a new direction. - [Wormhole Ventures]
- Game Dev Blog 004 - Wow look at this thing called Kickstarter!!!
- Computer - Hello Computer - Musings on Turing Tests
- Steem powered game development - idea for integrating games with steem blockchain
- Game Dev Blog 006 - The Steam Greenlight Experience - [Wormhole Ventures]
- Game Dev Blog 007 - A collage of Side Projects
- Game Dev Blog 008 - The Game was greenlit, what have we been up to?
- War of the Reborn 1 - Teaser and announcement
Conclusion
This post was written hopefully to provide access to materials to help people learn anything they might want that I skipped when writing tutorial posts here on Steemit. As you can see I took it a lot further than that and your learning opportunities should be far broader than they were before. I hope that a lot of game developers are born from these seeds. I want to play some of your games. I also want to increase the number of people out there in Steemit land that I can have technical conversations with on these subjects.
Steem On!
This is what I actually looking for
Thanks for the mention brother! Nice post too btw.
I've edited the post quite a few times trying to add the gamedev people on steemit who post game dev related posts. :)
Thanks a lot! I'll be paying a lot closer attention to your blog!
totally going to have to read over this all later....great links!
Great post!
Here is another useful tutorial, good for game developers - it explains how to make engaging teasers and trailers for your games: A Comprehensive Guide to Making Effective Teasers and Trailers