Game Dev

Best of Game Dev Report 2024!

With the year ended lets look back at the awesome stuff I covered in this newsletter. I started it in May and I haven't missed a single week, this idea was first a video but since that was so time consuming to produce I decided to make a text-only newsletter and it has worked out great.

Thank you for reading the newsletter and I hope you're learned some interesting things!

In total 34 newsletters with lots of interesting topics covered, I enjoyed doing some research right now to pick some highlights for this list:

• Steam Questions answered by Steam themselves

• What is the Fast Follow indie strategy

• $19 Billion pile of Shame

• Devs keep just 42% of revenue

• Awesome FREE Game UI Database

• Game Dev is NOT a lottery

• Dev Spent $600k on the future of game devs

• How many sales from 10 MILLION YouTube views?

• Janky game made $28 MILLION

• Guess the game from the boxart

• Predictions for 2025

Affiliate

New Year Sale! FREE Image Effects!

Unity is currently running their New Year Sale! (ENDING SOON!)

If you need assets to achieve your 2025 goals then check out what's on sale. Over 1500 assets so all the top ones are on sale plus a bunch of new ones.

I can highly recommend the usual great ones like FEEL (great for polish), Text Animator (perfect if your game has any text), Easy Save (for any kind of saving), Bakery (gorgeous baked lighting), Volumetric Lights (gorgeous visible light shafts) Asset Inventory (perfect for managing assets)

Plus you can get a bonus 10% OFF on orders above $120 with coupon NYS24.

Check out everything on sale HERE! (ENDS THIS WEEK!)

The Publisher of the Week this time is Fronkon Games, absolutely excellent image effects, this is an excellent way to massively improve how good your game looks.

Get the FREE Artistic: Tilt Shift which contains a really cool effect that makes your game look like a miniature, I love it!

Get it HERE and use coupon FRONKONGAMES at checkout to get it for FREE!

Game Dev

Dispelling the "Unity looks bad" myth

Thankfully this is something that isn't as common nowadays, but a few years ago there were lots of comments from clueless players talking about how Unity looks bad and Unreal looks awesome. Unreal has always looked incredible but Unity (while being a bit behind until recently) has always been able to produce excellent stuff.

Here is a post from a developer showcasing their great looking stylized game. For other examples you have Escape From Tarkov (most people don't know it's Unity) which features super realistic visuals. Another example is Genshin Impact, awesome stylized game that most people also don't know it's made with Unity. Or even games like Ori and the Blind Forest, absolutely gorgeous game, made in Unity.

As always Game Engines are just tools and it's up to the developer to use that tool to the best of their ability. Any engine can make ugly or gorgeous games.

Game Dev

Cool Procedural Spider-Robot!

Something I've always wanted to build is a nice procedural animation legs system. Here is a Reddit post from someone that decided the New Year was the perfect time to do that challenge.

It's all about IK, Unity has Animation Rigging (Tutorial) to help you achieve this.

Maybe there's some interesting system you've wanted to build for ages, and maybe now with the New Year it’s time to tackle that challenge!

Tech

Find ALL your accounts!

Just recently I found a very interesting website that allows you to search basically the whole internet for all your lost accounts.

It's called Whats My Name and it's apparently made by a company that is focused on cybersecurity and intelligence. You just write an email address and it will output what websites were found with that account. You can filter by categories or include everything.

There's also a GitHub if you want to know how it works, it's pretty neat!