I keep an ongoing list of links to useful or fun game design and production topics. This is not exhaustive by any means – just some interesting links. A lot of these are links saved from posts on Reddit’s r/gamedev subreddit.
Disclaimer: I haven’t used a lot of the tools or followed all of the tutorials. Most of this was saved “in case I need it later,” so I can’t vouch specifically for anything. If you think any of these are bad resources, please let me know!
YouTube Playlists
A playlist of my favorite YouTube videos about Game Development that I add to periodically
A playlist of my favorite YouTube videos about Game Design that I add to periodically (this includes videos from non-developers)
Game Industry Jobs
Amir’s LinkedIn Community Jobs Spreadsheet
Hitmarker: Gaming and eSports Jobs
Production / PR / Marketing / Business
Justify Your Project – A thorough presentation about making a business case for your game
Rami Ismail’s Game Pitch Template
Alan’s Gamedev Resources Sheet – An amazing free list of publishers and providers of localization and porting services
Altshift Steam Market Study template v1.4 – For research into Steam games to estimate sales and revenue
presskit() – A free presskit template for marketing games
How to Consistently Make Profitable Indie Games
The BIG List of Video Game PR Agencies and Freelancers
Making a successful low-budget Kickstarter video (Not video games but useful anyway)
Common marketing mistakes that game developers make
Postmortem on a bad Steam release of a game
AMA: My first game sold 50k in 2 weeks
Reddit discussion: How to hire freelance artists
A Quick Guide to Making Indie Game Trailers
Awesome Game Development Articles – Curated by Black Shell Media (spreadsheet)
Collection of well-designed itch.io pages for inspiration
Marketing Your Indie Game: The Single Most Important Thing to Learn
A twitter thread of game pitch templates
Pitching to Work On A Well-Known IP (article)
The “Dinner Party Jerk” Test (about pitching YOURSELF to investors)
My Twitch Live Coding Setup – Remarkably detailed and comprehensive guide to live-streaming your coding on Twitch
Some important notes about game trademarks and Kickstarter campaigns
The Top 50 Best-Selling Video Games of All Time (some real surprises in here! Thanks Isaac for the link!)
Design
Reversing the Design: Final Fantasy 6
Ask A Game Developer – Useful tumblr/blog
Level Design Compendium – Huge list of resources
Video: Color theory for game designers
How to use Unity tilemaps for hexagonal grids
Reddit discussion: Books for game development
GameMaker Studio 2: The Complete Guide
Postmortem: Three years building a point and click adventure game in Unity
Horror Game Design: Lessons from “Clever” and “Cheap” Horror Titles
Ten Books That Aren’t About Game Design… that every game designer should read
Awesome Game Design Videos – Curated by Black Shell Media
How Not To Suck At Game Design: Essays by Anjin Anhut
Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling (blog)
A Twitter thread with a collection game design docs
A Twitter thread with original design diagrams from the Dishonored series
The Best Free Tools for Narrative Games
Art
Unity tutorial: Lighting and post-processing a low-poly scene
Pixel art how-to: Starting Small
Game Developer Resources (includes articles and links too, but most useful for art)
Free Images For App Development
Mixamo: Animated 3D Characters (from Adobe)
Paletton: Color palette creator
Sound
Tons of high quality free sounds
The Largest Drum Machine Collection on the internet (not specifically for games but hey)
Fun infographic about how to properly do sound volume sliders in games
Super Audio Cart – A Komplete sample set of video game samples (paid)
Community
TIGSource – A community of independent game developers and players
Programming
A Twitter thread about procedural generation
Lessons Learned on Prototyping from 7500 hours of solo game development
Server-authoritative networking code starter kit for Unity
Shader repositories and other stuff
NPR Contour Shader in the Unity asset store
Reddit thread about a really cool particle shader
Creating destructible terrain in a 2D game
Hexagonal grids: Basically everything you need to know
Math for Game Developers: Trigonometry
Reddit Thread: Better game programming tutorials
Reddit thread: Free software for game development
Game backend-as-service alternatives
Shooter tutorial: Building a shooter from scratch in UE4
Reddit thread: 2D game engine structure
Maze: Building your own randomized place (Unity tutorial)
Combining Perspective and Orthographic Camera for Parallax Effect in 2D Game
Video (Unity): Writing High-Performance C# Scripts
How to Use a Shader to Dynamically Swap a Sprite’s Colors
quill18creates – Unity Tutorials (supported by Patreon)
How to Use Tile Bitmasking to Auto-Tile Your Level Layouts (I can vouch for this one!)
Tools
Doodle Studio 95: A Unity plugin for in-engine doodling, including animation
Nifty modeling tool for Unity (Reddit thread)
RPG Map Editor (Unity) – Looks like a good way to kickstart a top-down project
Realtime CSG – Recommended by a fellow developer as an alternative to ProBuilder for Unity
Juice FX – Useful set of animated effects for pixel art in Unity