Game Dev

Dev followed my FREE course, then made $150k!

My most successful video of all time (3 Million views!) is my FREE Kitchen Chaos course. It's a 10 hour course that is perfect for complete beginners and will teach you a ton if you go through it entirely.

Many devs have learned a lot from that course. One dev specifically started from there and now just published their game on Steam, Urban Jungle, which had a very successful launch with about 11,000 copies sold and $150,000 in revenue! Awesome!

The game is absolutely gorgeous, excellent art, very cozy, the reviews are 93% positive which is an excellent score.

I first wrote about this game a few months ago in another Game Dev Report. How they started from absolutely no knowledge and spent 2 months studying my course. The dev also wrote about their Wishlist journey and everything they did to get up to 93k wishlists before release.

So massive congrats to this dev on this very successful journey, and if you are also learning from my tutorials and courses then I really hope you learn a lot and manage to also find the success you're looking for!

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Game Dev

Unity releases FREE Vehicle Controller

Unity has just published an excellent FREE Vehicle Controller package. It's extremely capable, supports any vehicle scenario you can think of. Drive a sports car, or a pickup truck, or a giant 18 wheeler (you can add as many wheels as you want)

This is built on ECS so it's insanely performant, it comes with samples and full documentation.

Currently it's in the experimental stage, to install it you add it on the package manager by name using com.unity.vehicles

In case you don't know, they also have another similar package for a very robust Character Controller. That one is fully released and also has tons of samples to help you get started.

Making a good Character Controller or Vehicle Controller is an insane amount of work, there are assets on the Asset Store that do that and cost $100, so having a completely free one straight from Unity is awesome!

Tech

Why consoles no longer go down in price

Do you remember how back in the day Consoles used to go down in price? For example the original PS2 was $299 at launch, then 2 years after that it dropped to $199. That was the standard, Consoles (and many other electronics) would go down in price over time.

However recently, not only has that not happened, the opposite has happened! The PS5 originally launched for €499, and now it's on sale for €549!

Why is this happening?

Here is a really interesting article that tries to answer that question. Partly it's due to pandemic-era inflation, partly it's due to how console makers used to sell consoles at a loss but they no longer follow that strategy.

But perhaps the biggest reason is simply the "death" of Moore's law. Chips are no longer drastically improving every single year, therefore NOT making older chips much cheaper. One big way that chips have gotten more powerful in the past 40 years has been through making smaller and smaller transistors. The PS1 chip was 500nm, whereas nowadays the PS5 chip is already 6nm, that's insanely small amount and getting smaller becomes harder and harder. At some point you reach the limits of physics itself.

Will this change and get back to the way things were? Possibly but doubtful. The more likely scenario for console prices to go down is the rise of cloud streaming, if you just stream then all you need is a very basic chip, however that also usually comes with a monthly membership cost.

Fun

Clippy is back!

The unofficial PC mascot of the 90s was Clippy. The fun but annoying (and not really helpful) helper that came with Microsoft Office.

Nowadays with the rise of AI we can finally have an actually helpful Clippy! Someone tried building just that in this project where you can add Clippy to your desktop and chat with it to ask all kinds of questions, which will then provide answers using one of many available LLM models like Gemma, Llama, Qwen and more.

The GitHub is available if you want to see how it all works.

Or if you want to build it yourself, I made a tutorial on a Transparent Unity Window so you can combine that with a simple API to get results from an AI model.