(Part 2) Top products from r/Unity2D

I absolutely LOVE seeing aspiring artists :)

I will say the same thing to everyone who is at this point who is truly serious about improving their artwork. I suggest picking up the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards.

It's a 1 week, 4-8 hour a day book that will teach you how to see your art in a better light, and I think it will be much more useful to you than anything I could say about your work. (If you put up with the psuedoscience in the book, it's very worth it :)

So, I'll give some advice that will help after you've read it, just so I'm not leaving you dry with only a book, but I cannot stress this enough, don't do anything else until you read this book!

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From a compositional standpoint, I love it. It shows character with the pose that he has, having a large sword, not wearing anything, giant demonic wings.

From the larger perspective, you have everything you need, but I suggest really emphasizing a lot of the strong points here. Make the sword much larger, make his pose more exaggerated by making it look like his weight is truly shifted on one leg (Try copying the pose yourself and see what you can change. Take a picture if you have the option, even better have someone else take a picture)

Really emphasize that explosion in the background. Curve the wings more, and try to get them to flow with the pose, and really push out his casual attitude. Maybe even having the wings retracted could help in this :)

These are all fairly minor things in the grand scheme. I love it, so please, please keep going forward! Read the book, and what I say will make more sense. If you need any help understanding the concepts behind this stuff, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction. I really hope to see where you go with this!

A lot of the balancing comes from play testing with actual players and a basic understanding of probability math.

Randomness in games can often be a fun addition because it leads to surprises and can make a boring game more interesting. But you also want to use with caution because you want your players to still feel like they are in control. Too much RNG can make people feel that the game is unfair.

Pre-built maps are good if you want people to be able to master them, and generated maps are good if you want people to think on their feet every time. Pre-built can make things predictable, whereas generated can add replayability.

As for symmetrical maps, do you mean both players start with an even playing field? If so, that's ideal for balance. If you do intend to give one player a map advantage, you'd have to properly balance the other player to have some other advantage. Imagine playing golf. The player at a disadvantage might be granted a handicap. The important thing is that both players must feel like they are treated fairly.

Edit: If you're really interested, I'd recommend The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. There's 2 excellent chapters in there about game balance that details probability math, good design, and player psychology when dealing with balancing.

I love doing procedural maps but it is an evolving art (Especially for me). I recommend that you create an interface (Programming, not user) such as IMapProvider that returns the data your game needs for a new map. That way you can iterate and improve your map generation code to your hearts content and just swap new ones in without any hassle.

Check out articles such as those on Rogue Basin and the book Mazes for Programmers.

I started with a relatively simple generator that generates a number of rooms then connects close ones with corridors until all rooms are connected. It works but is slow (Limiting map size). Later I created a new generator based on the Mazes for Programmers book that is several orders of magnitude faster and more flexible.

Also look at the blogs of people in r/roguelikedev such as the creators of spelunky and cogmind

Here are some good books I recommend to you.

They can be read on the go as well, though they are mostly project based, therefore they require you to do the projects on the computer while you are reading. But of course you can read it anywhere and then later when you are near the computer, you can attempt to recreate the little games they show. (thats what I did with the first book on this list)

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• Jonathon Manning & Paris Buttfield-Addison: Mobile Game Development with Unity: Build Once, Deploy Anywhere
  
• Joe Hocking: Unity in Action: Multiplatform game development in C#
  
• Ashley Godbold: Mastering Unity 2D Game Development - Second Edition
  
• Dr. Edward Lavieri: Getting Started with Unity 2018 - Third Edition: A Beginner's Guide to 2D and 3D game development with Unity
  
• Lauren S. Ferro & Francesco Sapio: Unity 2017 2D Game Development Projects: Create three interactive and engaging 2D games with Unity 2017

Unity in Action by Joseph Hocking is a solid book for programmers who wish to learn unity. The /r/gamedev thread is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/7ku0zw/i_read_unity_in_action_so_you_dont_have_to_a/

Unity has excellent official documentation from my experience, especially compared to Unreal.

I didn't know this. I figured some portion would be applicable but probably not a ton or even most. I grabbed head first C# for a different reason and ended up not needing it and am now hopeful that it wasn't money wasted even if it doesn't directly have to do with Unity.

I would say that this one is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Unity-Development-Hours-Teach-Yourself/dp/0672336960

I am working through this

Game Design Prototyping and Development

I am enjoying it so far. I have done some coding before but the pace in the book is nice and slow

You can also get Lindenmayer's book used on amazon for 20 bucks.

https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Beauty-Plants-Virtual-Laboratory/dp/0387972978/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1?keywords=the+algorithmic+beauty+of+plants&qid=1549593472&sr=8-1-fkmrnull