Awesome UI resource, and Keep Games Alive

Also Steam bigger assets and Robots keep growing

Author

Code Monkey
August 11, 2024

Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

Have you been watching the Olympics? It's fascinating to watch the peak of human physical fitness.

The other day I saw the Woman's Triathlon where they made it in under 2 hours which is insane! I'm decently fit and it would take me at least double that amount of time, the gap between normal people and Olympians is crazy!

By the way, if you're a channel member (or if you bought one of my courses) remember how I do a private livestream every Saturday. I'm there to answer whatever questions you have.

You can find the link in the members discord or on YouTube.

  • Game Dev: Game UI DB, Stop Killing Games, Steam Assets

  • Tech: Figure 02

Game Dev

Use this resource to make AWESOME UI!

Do you want to quickly do a ton of UI research to figure out how to make the best UI possible for your games?

If so then here's an excellent resource that just got a huge update, it's the Game UI Database 2.0

It's an EXCELLENT resource, the amount of content and detail is truly insane. You can browse over 1300 games, 55000 screens and 1700 videos.

Do you want to study the UI of the original Half-Life without having to install it? Here it is! Easily see how all the Menus are setup, what the Player vitals look like or how the inventory is setup.

Or for something stylish here is the Persona 5 page where you can see all the super cool UI in that game.

Building a good UI is a really difficult task, so using this resource you can look at games similar to yours to see how they implemented their UI and get ideas for how to make your games better. And since it's a website with a ton of images you can easily analyze the UI of a dozen games without having to spend tons of time installing and manually playing games for research.

I love it when the community builds such awesome tools, this is really an excellent learning resource for game devs.

It's completely free without ads, just pure educational content, if you want to help support the server costs you can give a donation, I've donated myself.

Game Dev

Stop Killing Games?

Have you ever bought a singleplayer game and then suddenly you were unable to play it? Or maybe you had a favorite multiplayer game that is now unplayable because the servers are down?

Sadly that is an issue that is likely to happen more and more over time as games have more online features, even singleplayer games.

In order to help prevent that future there is an initiative on the EU where if it gets enough votes it will be discussed in parliament and potentially one day become law that games cannot be taken away from you. The publisher needs to leave them in a functional state. Kind of like how even though Valve no longer supports Counter Strike 1.6, I can still launch the game and I can still play on dedicated servers hosted by regular people.

Or how League of Legends and Apex Legends already have dedicated server tech that they use in their LAN tournaments, this would just require them to publish those servers if/when the games die. GTAV also has dedicated servers.

This is a topic that has gotten quite a lot of discourse lately, especially because Thor from Pirate Software who has a huge audience came out very much against it.

I made a video on this topic, covering some of the pros and cons of this. There is also a new 40 minute video that covers even more questions.

Ultimately I feel that, while there are edge cases that need to be worked out, this is very much a conversation that should happen so since I am a EU citizen I have signed the petition which is currently 25% of the way to 1 million votes.

I mainly play singleplayer games so I really dislike the idea that a singleplayer game can suddenly become unplayable just because online servers go down. The Crew is the main example given, it was a game with both singleplayer and multiplayer, although even if you bought the game you can no longer play it, not even in singleplayer. I don't think that's right.

Game Dev

Steam BIG Assets and Reviews update

Steam is updating their store pages to require larger assets, 2x the previous size.

The goal is to be able to show better assets in more high-res devices like the Steam Deck OLED which has a higher dpi screen. The new assets will be rolling out over the next few months.

There are templates you can download and replace with your own assets.

That page also answers a funny question, "Why are banners referred to as 'capsules' on Steam?", turns out it's just a random name someone came up with many many years ago when building the original version of Steam.

Another piece of Steam news is how they are apparently looking to update how reviews show up, filtering them by "Summary", "Most Helpful", "Recent" or "Funny"

I would guess this would not impact the actual review score, it would simply make more helpful reviews more prominent which sounds like a good change.

I really like how Steam is constantly trying to improve itself, and I really dislike making art assets so this is a tricky one heh.

One of the parts that I most dislike about launching a game is having to build all the tons of assets in all the various resolutions. It's an annoying part of the job but it has to be done.

At least they're not requiring you to go back and change old games, only future ones.

Tech

The Robots are coming!

One of the big humanoid robotics companies, Figure, has just launched the second version of their model, Figure 02.

It looks really impressive with intricate finger dexterity, wide range of movement for all limbs, 6 cameras with AI vision. Also includes Speech-to-Speech reasoning, which I’m guessing means you can talk to it and it will understand what actions to take. It walks in a funny way, it’s clearly meant to be a usable tool and not mimic humans perfectly. It can also grab and hold up to 25Kg which is actually pretty strong!

It also apparently learns from mistakes and corrects itself for the future which sounds fascinating. I wonder how does it detect mistakes, is it automatic or manual?

I love robotics, in an alternate universe I would love to work on these sorts of robotics. The mini-projects that I have built with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis has been really satisfying, definitely wish I had more time to play around in that area some more.

  • The Mechanic Killing Games Before They Start | Design Delve

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD-9HL-BzfA

    Very interesting exploration on how a death mechanic can negatively impact how your player feels by becoming trivial

  • Committing game dev crimes to finish my game

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwTwqL6P6KU

    Lots of tricks that Luke used to bring his game to life, you definitely need to be very clever in order to build many things in your games!

Get Rewards by Sending the Game Dev Report to a friend!

(please don’t try to cheat the system with temp emails, it won’t work, just makes it annoying for me to validate)

Thanks for reading!

Code Monkey

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