Game Dev

June Next Fest Tips!

Are you participating in the Steam June Next Fest? If so then you should keep up to date with the Steam meta to get the most out of your festival participation.

Valve does some QA videos every once in a while which are great for getting info from Valve themselves on how the algorithm works. The last QA video was on April 1st where they answer various Next Fest questions.

One developer on Reddit compiled a bunch of tips for you to get the most out of Next Fest:

• First 48 hours are EXTREMELY important, everyone is on a level playing field during this time, you get as much visibility as a AAA game so make it count!

• Tags are also extremely important, make sure you set them up correctly.

• You can set up a separate demo page, might be good in some cases, players can review your demo.

• Make sure you have a good store page with calls to action to wishlist your game

• Ask directly for wishlists inside your game on almost every screen or pause menu.

Then in general I also made a video with some tips from when I participated on Next Fest myself with my game Dinky Guardians. Or you can watch the Marketing videos I did with a Steam Marketing Expert to help you get more wishlists.

Best of luck with your game on the festival, I hope you get tons of wishlists!

Affiliate

FREE Tokyo Street

The Publisher of the Week this time is Art Equilibrium, publisher with tons of realistic environments and props.

Get the FREE Tokyo Street which is a super high quality 3D environment of a street in Tokyo. Perfect for a Yakuza-like game.

Get it HERE and use coupon ARTEQUILIBRIUM2025 at checkout to get it for FREE!

Also I’m currently hard at work on an update to my C# course adding some fun Beginner C# Projects!

Things like FizzBuzz, Hangman, Quiz, Calculator, etc.

These are small beginner friendly projects that you should be able to do if you fully understand everything in the beginner section of the course. And in building these projects you will validate that you did gain all that knowledge.

Free Update coming later this month, stay tuned!

Gaming

BIG Announcements from Summer Game Fest!

Summer is here which means not-E3 or Summer Game Fest! The 2 hour livestream was this past Friday.

It actually started off on a great note praising the excellent work indie devs and small teams have made recently. From Repo to Schedule I (solo dev) as well as Inzoi and Expedition 33. All great games, all very successful, all from small teams made possible by the excellent tools that exist nowadays like Unity and Unreal.

The first announcement was also from a studio that started off by just 4 developers and grew to 30 people, it's the gorgeous looking Mortal Shell 2. Then Kojima showed up to reveal more about Death Stranding 2, personally I love the first one so I can't wait for this one.

• Chronicles Medieval looks like an excellent Mount & Blade-like game.

• End of Abyss is a super cool looking top-down shooter

• Mouse PI for Hire, the Mickey Mouse shooting game that has been in development for a long time, now has Troy Baker voicing.

• War for Westeros is the Game of Thrones RTS, finally!

• Marvel Cosmic Invasion is a cool brawler

• Killer Inn is a murder mystery multiplayer game

• Out of Words is a cute handcrafted co-op journey.

• Mina The Hollower, from the creators of Shovel Knight

• Deadpool VR, a silly VR shooter

• Acts of Blood, is an exellent 3D melee brawler

• Ill is a freaky first person horror game

And many more games like Atomic Heart 2, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, LEGO Voyagers, Lies of P Overture, Jurassic World Evolution 3, and Resident Evil Requiem closed the show.

Gaming

The Switch 2 is out!

After years of rumors and waiting, the Switch 2 is finally released!

It's bigger than the original, 7.9 inch display, 1080p or 4k docked, up to 120 fps, 256GB expandable to 2TB, 2-6 hour battery life, NVIDIA GPU and more. All can be yours for $449.

Reviews are how it's basically an improved Switch, it's not a drastic change in the formula but rather a new iteration.

The highlighted launch game is Mario Kart World, which arrives 11 YEARS after the last entry, and it arrives at a $79.99 pricepoint (yikes!)

Other games like Donkey Kong Bonanza, Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, and Duskbloods will be coming out in the future. And of course there are tons of already released games that got Switch ports like Cyberpunk 2077, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and more.

In terms of extras, there is a Camera you can use with certain games, for example in Mario Kart World you can see your friends faces above their cars. Another extra is how the Joy Con Controllers can now be used as a Mouse on certain games, personally I hate playing shooting games on a controller so this feature can be a great thing, I wonder how many people will end up using it.

Fun

3D render of how a T-Shirt is made

Do you know how a T-Shirt is made? I have a rough idea but not really.

Here is an amazing 3D render showing that process. Apparently cotton grows in one single long thread that gets all mushed together into a ball? I didn't know that, I thought those balls were like cotton candy, I thought they would fall appart but based on the video that's not the case.

Then stringing multiple strands together you get proper cotton strings, and from there you can knit it onto a shirt, neat!