Game Dev

Avoid Overengineering!

I love making complex systems that are code heavy and support everything from the most basic use cases to the most complex. But, while it is fun to write code, always remember to not needlessly overengineer your projects.

This response to a Reddit post is excellent. The original post is asking about whether it's best to create/delete projectiles or just enable/disable them.

In technical terms the answer is enable/disable, meaning use an object pool. However, in real terms, it's likely that the answer does not matter. Spawning and Destroying objects is indeed more expensive, but unless you're making a bullet hell shooter then it won't matter. If your player fires one bullet per second then the difference between the two methods is negligible.

So the main takeaway here is be wary of overengineering. Not every problem requires the ULTIMATE PERFECT solution, sometimes "just works" is more than good enough and you're better off doing that and moving onto the next task. This does NOT mean write sloppy code! Even if you go with “just works” make sure you write it properly.

Another great saying is "premature optimization is the root of all evil", meaning don't waste time trying to optimize some code until you have already identified that there is a problem with that code.

You should absolutely always be thinking of the best way to do things, but sometimes the best way is "good enough" so you can move on and actually complete your projects.

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Game Dev

High Quality vs Low Quality Wishlists

If you're a developer then you already know just how important wishlists are, they can make or break your game.

If you launch with <1,000 wishlists then your odds of success are very low. If you launch with >10,000 wishlists then your odds of success improve dramatically.

But are all wishlists the same? Technically no, this post talks about the concept of wishlist quality.

The article features an excellent marketing lead scoring diagram that easily explains what actions make one lead more valuable than another one. This is an excellent concept to learn both in game marketing but also in any kind of marketing/promotion.

Someone that just presses the button is a lot less committed than someone that joins the game Discord, opens your emails and posts messages on the forums. The post has some excellent tips on how to improve the quality of your leads/wishlists.

Technically you would want all your wishlists to be high quality and convert as soon as the game is out (that's the goal), and if you're doing paid promotion then you definitely want high quality leads.

But if you're doing organic promotion then don't worry too much about "quality", just get as many wishlists as possible and, as long as you didn't do anything shady to get them, you will hopefully have a successful launch!

Tech

Introducing: The Steam Brick

Do you like your Steam Deck? Do you wish it were quite a bit smaller? Enter the Steam Brick!

Basically one dev took a Steam Deck apart piece by piece until only the core essentials remained. Screen? Out. Controllers? Out. Just kept the battery and internals, the bare minimum to make it work.

In the end it does work! The before and after pictures show a massive change in size, this one can actually fit in a pocket! Just pair it with a screen (or some AR glasses) and a controller and it's good to go.

There's an FAQ on the website which includes this excellent question:

"Why did you do this again? Because I was so preoccupied with whether or not I could that I didn’t stop to think if I should."

Funny, although I think it's actually useful! This is a very custom build but it would be great if there was an official implementation of something like this.

Fun

Dev made Unity plugin for ISS urine...

One dev made a pretty funny Unity plugin, it adds an icon on the Unity editor to display the current urine level aboard the International Space Station.

Right away you might be asking, why would anyone do this? To quote one of the brightest scientific minds of our time, Cave Johnson from Portal: "Science isn't about why, it's about why not!"

Although more seriously, if you want to learn a tool, like UI Toolkit, then doing silly things like this can be a great practice project. You get to use the tool in an actual project as opposed to just learning the theory. This is a great learning strategy even if what you're building is something silly for fun.

The dev made a public GitHub if you want to see how it works. It uses another super useful plugin for customizing the toolbar and the data from the ISS is grabbed from here.