Game Dev

Can YOU make Megabonk (and $8mil) in 1 month?

There is a game that is a mega hit that came out recently, it's Megabonk.

It's a third-person vampire-survivors-like. Tons of enemies, tons of weapons/upgrades, PS1 aesthetic and lots of memes. It's already sold around 1 MILLION copies ($8 million) and players love it with 94% positive review scores.

In terms of mechanics the game does indeed seem nothing too complex, you've got vampire-survivors-like gameplay but in third person. Doesn’t seem technically that difficult which in turn means this leads to an "interesting" discussion happening on Reddit where some people are saying "I can make this game better in a month"

Now I think this sentiment is ridiculous and no game dev with any amount of experience would say such a thing with a straight face, but it does lead to one very important point that is often hard to understand, it's on the difficulty of game design and how hard it is to design a good compelling game.

In technical terms a good game dev can indeed clone Megabonk in a few months, however that is only because the design is already done, all the hard decisions of figuring out what works and what doesn't is already done. That's the really hard part about game dev. Cloning something that is already done is infinitely easier than coming up with something from scratch.

That's also why some great advice if you want to find success as a game dev is find out what already works and just tweak it a bit. Your odds of ending up with something worthwhile are infinitely better than if you try making something completely original or a very new idea completely from scratch. The recent excellent Jonas Tyroller video talks about this topic.

Since this game is such a huge hit I have a feeling the next 12 months will be filled with lots of Megabonk-likes.

Oh and there's also theories that the developer behind this game is Dani. The name Vedinad is DaniDev backwards, the thumbnails on YouTube are very similar and both are from Norway. However the voice is different so it could really just be a fan, or a voice changer. Whoever it is, either the same person or someone else, clearly both are extremely skilled both as developers and marketers.

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I’ve recently made another Asset Review video, this time on the excellent Mesh Extractor.

This is an excellent helper tool that has helped me out quite a bit in the past few years. It helps you basically get more out of every asset you already have by picking up pieces from various meshes and reusing them in different ways.

Watch my video to see how easy it is to use.

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Game Dev

Do players like Pixel art?

One developer on Reddit did a very interesting thorough study on Pixel Art games trying to figure out if that style is something players like or not. The result is out of 6422 games, only 5% managed to hit 500 reviews! That's rough!

Now this might not necessarily mean that Pixel art is responsible for the bad results (although if you're a solo dev then 500 reviews is a hit, not just a "decent" result). Perhaps it is simply the case that more beginners choose pixel art therefore the games are more amateurish as opposed to other styles.

The developer tried doing some manual analysis of the outliers to try to get some sense of the data. Within this style the big winners were Turn-Based + RPG as well as Difficult games, so it appears perhaps this style can be good for more hardcore games whereas games tagged Cute or Magic did not do as well. Based on my own manual analysis I would say this tracks, I have done some research on TikTok/Instagram which are platforms where a bunch of games have found quite a lot of success, and the cozy genre is a big one on there, however those cozy games are almost never pixel art, usually it's more low poly and soft colors.

Singleplayer seems to be more common than Multiplayer in Pixel Art games, and Horror, Visual Novel, Bullet Hell, Puzzle and First Person seem to be the worst performers. Although to be fair, those genres (other than Horror) are very rough genres on Steam as a whole.

I think the main takeaway from this is how it is very difficult to make GOOD pixel art, and it's very easy to make BAD pixel art. Games, and especially game marketing, is a very visual thing and if your game does not look excellent on the first few seconds then you're off to a rough start.

Tech

One TRILLION Webpages saved!

One of the magical wonders of the internet is the Internet Archive also known as The Wayback Machine. This is a non-profit that attempts to store just about everything on the internet. For example you can see how Steam looked like all the way back in 2007, very different!

They are constantly saving a ton of webpages every single day and just recently hit the 1 TRILLION milestone! That's an insane amount!

They are doing a bunch of talks all throughout October so if you're interested in preservation of the web definitely give them a watch. Oh and this is a non-profit so they rely on donations, if you can send a few bucks their way, I will send a donation myself since I really value what they're doing.

Fun

Turn your screen into a 3D portal!

3D without glasses/headsets is something I always find fascinating. One former Meta engineer did exactly that with a simple camera.

Basically it uses the laptop camera to find your head, then reprojects the screen in realtime to match what you would see if it was a 3D scene. The result is an image that moves which gives it some very impressive simulated depth, WITHOUT any glasses! The On vs Off demo is super impressive.