The Best Envato Tuts+ Game Development Posts From 2015

As 2015 draws to a close, let’s take a look back at the great game development how-to tutorials and articles our wonderful instructor team wrote this year! There were high-level posts on game design and level design, beginners’ guides to shaders and more advanced guides to pathfinding, inspirational posts to dip in to the next time you’re coming up with ideas for a new game, and plenty more… 

Level Design

I’m really excited to have Mike Stout and Patrick Holleman writing for us. Mike’s a video game designer whose major credits include games in the Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, and Skylanders series; Patrick runs The Game Design Forum and has spent hundreds of hours reverse-engineering the design of hit games to see how they tick. Each is using their considerable knowledge and experience to teach valuable level design concepts.

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  Game Design
  Level Design: Views and Vistas
  Mike Stout

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  Level Design
  How to Design Levels With the “Super Mario World Method”
  Patrick Holleman

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  Level Design
  The Super Mario World Method: Using Evolutions and Expansions
  Patrick Holleman

Shaders

Shaders are useful in both 2D and 3D games, and in certain projects you’d have a hard time avoiding coding them at all. But they can often feel like a dark art, since coding them effectively requires a different mindset. Omar’s excellent three-part Beginner’s Guide demystifies them, making it easy to grasp the basics right away, and David and Daniel’s tutorials break down more advanced uses of them in action.

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  Shaders
  A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders
  Omar Shehata

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  Shaders
  A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders: Part 2
  Omar Shehata

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  WebGL
  Building Shaders With Babylon.js and WebGL: Theory and Examples
  David Catuhe

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  Shaders
  A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders: Part 3
  Omar Shehata

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  Shaders
  How to Use a Shader to Dynamically Swap a Sprite’s Colors
  Daniel Branicki

Pathfinding for 2D Platformers

Most game developers who have needed to calculate a path from A to B will be familiar with the A* pathfinding algorithm. (If you aren’t, check out Patrick Lester’s great introduction.) In this series, Daniel Branicki builds on A* to create a pathfinder that works for grid-based 2D platformers, and then adds a bunch of extra features.   

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  Pathfinding
  How to Adapt A* Pathfinding to a 2D Grid-Based Platformer: Theory
  Daniel Branicki

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  Pathfinding
  How to Adapt A* Pathfinding to a 2D Grid-Based Platformer: Implementation
  Daniel Branicki

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  Pathfinding
  A* Pathfinding for 2D Grid-Based Platformers: Adding One-Way Platforms
  Daniel Branicki

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  Pathfinding
  A* Pathfinding for 2D Grid-Based Platformers: Different Character Sizes
  Daniel Branicki

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  Pathfinding
  A* Pathfinding for 2D Grid-Based Platformers: Making a Bot Follow the Path
  Daniel Branicki

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  Pathfinding
  A* Pathfinding for 2D Grid-Based Platformers: Ledge Grabbing
  Daniel Branicki

Inspiration for Your Next Game’s Theme and Genre

Next time you’re scratching your head trying to come up with an idea for a new game (whether it’s a big project or a weekend game jam), get inspiration from one of Matthias’s round-ups of underused game genres and themes. 

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  Game Design
  9 Rare and Underused Game Genres Ready to Explore
  Matthias Zarzecki

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  Game Design
  8 Classic Game Genres Ready to Explore Again
  Matthias Zarzecki

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  Game Design
  9 More Inexplicably Underused Game Genres for Your Next Project
  Matthias Zarzecki

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  Game Design
  Stuck for Your Next Game’s Theme? Try These 6 Ideas
  Matthias Zarzecki

Creating a Game Using Steering Behaviours

Fernando has been writing tutorials about steering behaviours since 2012. Last year, he showed how we can use them to power the AI for a hockey game; this year, he broke down the game mechanics themselves, and gave us a revealing post-mortem about the whole project.

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  artificial intelligence
  Create a Hockey Game AI Using Steering Behaviors: Game Mechanics
  Fernando Bevilacqua

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  Post Mortem
  Hockeynamite – Development Post Mortem
  Fernando Bevilacqua

Learning a New Language or Platform

We have, admittedly, slowed down our efforts to collate the best resources for learning the many game development engines out there—perhaps this deserves renewed focus in 2016—but returning instructors Lee and Aditya did cover JavaFX and the very popular Pygame.

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  Java
  Introduction to JavaFX for Game Development
  Lee Stemkoski

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  How to Learn
  How to Learn Pygame
  Aditya Keerthi

Game Design

While we’ve focused more on longer series of posts when it comes to coding games, for our game design posts we’ve mainly gone for one-off articles.

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  Game Mechanics
  5 Approaches to Crafting Systems in Games (and Where to Use Them)
  Alexander King

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  Game Design
  4 Ways to Teach Your Players How to Play Your Game
  Darran Jamieson

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  Game Design
  Let Them Play: Don’t Lock Your Players Out of Playing
  Darran Jamieson

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  Game Design
  Minimalism in Game Design: Examples, Tips, and Ideas
  Sonny Bone

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  artificial intelligence
  Making AI Fun: When Good Enough is Good Enough
  Darran Jamieson

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  Game Design
  The Key Design Elements of Roguelikes
  Alexander King

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  Game Design
  A Mini-Post on Post-Match Mini-Achievements
  Matthias Zarzecki

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  Game Design
  Numbers Getting Bigger: What Are Incremental Games, and Why Are They Fun?
  Alexander King

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  Game Mechanics
  How to Incorporate Satisfying Death Mechanics Into Your Game
  Matthias Zarzecki

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  Game Design
  What Makes Games Funny? A Look at Comedy and Humour in Video Games
  Matthias Zarzecki

Miscellaneous Tips

These tutorials don’t fit in any other category, but they’re full of valuable advice nonetheless!

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  Monetization
  How, Where, and When to Add Video Ads to Your Mobile Games
  Daniel Williams

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  Game Design
  Bringing Your Game to Life in 10 Simple Steps
  Sonny Bone

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  Project Management
  How (and Why) to Write a Great Game Design Document
  Alex Sayenko

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  Game Audio
  4 Simple Techniques for Optimizing Your Game’s Audio
  Jordan Reed

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  Marketing
  Open Graph Stories: The Secret to Increasing Virality in Facebook Games
  Matteo Sciutteri

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  Funding
  How to Fund Your Games By Creating and Selling Game Assets
  Oussama Bouanani

See You In 2016!

In 2016 you can count on more level design tutorials from Mike and Patrick, more maths tutorials from Fernando, more shader tutorials from Omar, and more platformer tutorials from Daniel—and that’s just what our regulars have lined up already! What would you like to see on the site? Have a great new year!

References

• Preview image: Calendar by Laurent Patain from the Noun Project