Reading Materials to Supplement Game Development

I am fairly new to unity and game development in general and I am hoping for some (free) pdfs or articles of various topics in game development for unity and blender. I have a night job that gives me a lot of down time, however my laptop is not powerful enough for game development, and I use my pc at home for working on my projects. Instead I am hoping to find reading materials that I can study during my shifts at work.

I want to know what the most essential topics for game development are, what might benefit me the most. I am studying C# of course, but it would be nice to move on to a more fun topic for when I get bored. Whenever I follow tutorials, a lot of the terms are foreign to me, so I want to increase overall knowledge.

I'm thinking stuff that will tell me the basics of a bunch of categories such as:

• lighting
• rendering
• shaders
• modelling (blender)

and honestly anything else. I'm sorry if this post is incoherent, what I'm trying to say is I feel like I know nothing, and have an opportunity to learn something. If anyone has any suggestions, I am very grateful.

 

I'll always recommend catlike coding. They've got great tutorials on a lot of topics (including shaders and rendering). The tutorial page can be found here.

For more shader-specific, Alan Zucconi's site has a couple of great introductory tutorials (including both theory and practical info), like A gentle introduction to shaders (part 1 of 5)

For high-level approach to game code (though not based on a particular language), have a look at gameprogrammingpatterns. It's available as an ebook/pdf for a fee but can be read for free on the site. I found it really useful for inspiration on architecture and technical design.

 

Thanks Mr.Archer! Lots of material, exactly what I needed! Though if anyone has more I am happy to add more to the list!

 

From a similar question in another thread: