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CM Unity Quick Start Package (And other things I find useful) Sticky

A topic by Caliber Mengsk created Jun 28, 2021 Views: 1,182 Replies: 13
Viewing posts 1 to 8
(7 edits) (+8)

Info:

This is a package I've been working on a bit here and there before/during the low rez jam for 3 or 4 years now. It's an easy to use Unity package to get people up and going near instantaneously. You can just import the package, go into the CMAssets > Prefabs folder, and just drag in the 2d or 3d camera for the project you want. 

The package uses a render texture camera at 64x64 pixel resolution and scales to the screen based on height with a nearest neighbor scaling method. This means it's not blurry pixels and will be crisp and at any resolution.

The entire package is tiny at only 50kb, including the example textures, scenes, scripts, etc. If that's even too much for you, there are instructions on how to remove the extra stuff and only leaves you with JUST the cameras. 

Credits would be appreciated, but are not required. If you use it in your game, post a link to it here so I can see it!

Enjoy!

NOTE: This package was made in the newest version of unity (2021.1.12f1) at the time this post was created. Scenes, prefabs, etc may not work in older versions of unity, but the code itself should. You could try to rebuild it if you are using an older version if you'd like.

Download Link: http://ocularobscura.com/unity/packages/CMLowRezStarter.unitypackage

Backup Link: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=10VjKsy0pkSs8qCk2C5jwao_onGepJ2OU&export=download


Get started in as little as 10 seconds:


Example scenes for 2d and 3d scenes with message box support:




Other things I've found useful for jams:

https://www.tilesetter.org/ - This is a useful tool for quickly creating autotile tilesets. It even has an export option for multiple game engines, though the direct export to a specific engine is a pay for feature, it is only $12 if you decide you need it, but it can export to just a normal tileset image in the free version.

https://trello.com/ or https://monday.com/ - Keep your ideas in tact. A kanban or task manager can be super useful. Make a list for Major goals, Programming tasks, Art tasks, etc. Share the board with your team so people can update what they are working on and what they've finished.

https://www.screentogif.com/ - This program is super awesome for doing quick grabs to show off the cool new thing you've just done to your friends or in your dev log. If you make it short enough, less than 3 megabytes then you can upload it to a twitch post here, or (I think) 8 megabytes on discord. NOTE: The gifs in this post were made with this software. NOTE 2: You can save to webm in the newer versions of this, which can drastically reduce size while keeping quality. These also work in discord.

Submitted(+2)

For anyone using Godot I found this tutorial super helpful for pixelated games (It works in 2d also)

Thanks muchly for the Unity tool! gonna be usin' that this jam

Submitted

That's allowed?? If so that would make game creation alot easier! With the Unity tool do we still have to set the window size or does this tool also handle that?

(+1)

It automatically will keep the 1:1 aspect ratio even if you select a 16:9 or 16:10 resolution or whatever. As long as the assets are available to everyone it's within the rules to use any asset (even if you have to pay for it), but I personally feel that you shouldn't have to waste 6 hours the first day trying to get everything set up just to get the resolution right. This all has been confirmed as ok by the jam admins.

That's a really helpful unity package! But for some reason I can't download the file? Can you please post another download link to like mediafire? Thank you!

(+1)

Uploaded to google drive. This link should work, I'll update the main post, but here's the link to that. https://drive.google.com/uc?id=10VjKsy0pkSs8qCk2C5jwao_onGepJ2OU&export=download

Thank you for the link! Now maybe I can participate in the jam!

Good luck and enjoy!

Submitted

I had to copy the link. Open a new tab and paste it and pressed enter. It showed a download browser. Opening link in new tab or clicking link directly does not work for some reason.

(+2)

This guy has an alternative way of getting the same effect. Might be worth checking out to.

To summarize the video though:

Create a Render Texture (right click in Assets > Create > Render Texture)

Change the size of the Render Texture to 64x64 (or whichever resolution you want)

Apply the texture to your Camera

Create a Raw Image UI element (GameObject > UI > Raw Image)

Resize the Raw Image to fit the whole canvas

Apply the texture to the raw image.

(+1)

Yep. That's what mine does. It's just set up so that you can drag and drop it. It also is configured to where it scales to resize and keep aspect properly without stretching and such. But it is using that method at it's core.

To the experienced unity dev, this only saves like 10 minutes, but to someone that's newer or just hasn't done anything like this before but is still experienced, it could save several hours. 

what pixels per unit should i use?

(1 edit)

That depends on you. I have the camera set to an orthographic view of 4, meaning a total of 8 units on the screen, so if you don't want to change anything then it would be 8 pixels per unit. (that would make an 8x8 tile grid of 8x8px tiles at 1 unit per tile.)

You can change the orthographic view to increase/decrease the pixels per unit if you'd like though.