List of Useful Resources

Below is a list of resources (guides, tutorials, books, etc.) that has helped me in the past.

Game Development Related

• Catlike Coding - Unity tutorials on procedural generation, rendering, character movement, etc.

• Freya Holmér's channel - introductory lectures on shaders and lighting, math/linear algebra for game development, etc.

• Sebastian Lague's channel - game/shader programming vlogs, "Coding Adventures" which serve as entertaining and educational introductions to difficult topics in programming

• Acerola's channel - like Sebastian Lague, entertaining and educational videos for topics in shaders/graphics programming

• The Art of Game Design book by Jesse Schell - many perspectives on designing the different aspects of games, provides many "lenses"/prompts for inspecting and improving particular parts of a game's design

• This reinforcement learning lecture series by David Silver - theory for reinforcement learning (a branch of machine learning), which has potential applications in games (i.e. Unity ML-Agents)

GDC Talks:

• One-Page Designs by Stone Librande - alternative way of making design documents that I find useful for my projects
• Design in Detail: Changing the Time Between Shots for the Sniper Rifle from 0.5 to 0.7 Seconds for Halo 3 by Jaime Griesemer - I just like the part where he talks about how it was better to limit the strengths of the rifle than it was to make its weaknesses more exploitable
• Cursed Problems in Game Design by Alex Jaffe - exploration of difficult game design problems and the 4 ways they tend to be solved

Tools

Here are some tools that I have used and like:

Free or Open Source Tools

• VS Code - general purpose text/code editor
• Unity - game engine with a large community and many resources
• Krita - art, image editing, etc.
• Inkscape - vector graphics (SVG) editor
• Blender - 3D modelling, animation, etc.
• ffmpeg - audio/video format conversion
• Tenacity - simple audio editing, fork of Audacity
• kdenlive - video editing
• OBS - screen recording, livestreaming
• qView - image viewer
• Okular - PDF/ebook reader
• Microsoft PowerToys - Windows 11 utils — color picker, mass rename, quick launcher (like Mac Spotlight), etc.
• TreeSize (or WizTree) - Windows utility for visualizing disk space usage, very useful when trying to find files to delete when freeing up disk space

Paid Tools

• Rider - C# IDE with some Unity-specific features, free for students

Other

When trying to learn skills like drawing or improving at competitive video games, I like to look for guides or coaching videos that focus on the fundamental concepts, as well as lecture-style guides or textbooks that delve into specific examples and applications of those concepts.

Japanese Language Learning

• jpdb.io - comprehensive resource for Japanese vocabulary and Kanji learning with its own spaced-repetition system (for memorization) and anime-based vocabulary decks
• Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar - lightweight Japanese grammar textbook

Competitive Gaming

League of Legends:

• xFSN Saber - ADC video guides and coaching
• Nathan Mott - jungle concepts and champion guides
• Coach Curtis - mid champion guides, very in-depth

Teamfight Tactics:

• Mismatched Socks TFT Academy - general concepts/fundamentals, based on past sets but transferable to present sets
• Garchompro - overview of team comps, detailed guides for fundamentals skills like making items and positioning units