Game Dev

Epic unveils MEGALIGHTS! (UE 5.5)

Epic has just showcased Unreal 5.5 which contains lots of new features and updates. The biggest one of all is aptly titled Megalights, it lets developers use hundreds of realtime dynamic lights in a single scene. It can display textured area lights, it can render lots of them and each light can also have shadows. On top of that, this super impressive demo was running on a base PS5!

This is still just in preview, no mention on when it will be production ready, but if they can get it working exactly like in this demo then many developers will be extremely happy.

They also showcased Nanite Skinned Meshes, meaning apply their extremely detailed mesh system to characters. More improvements to lumen and raytracing, alongside animation improvements (which can now be authored in-engine)

Also improvements to mobile with platform simulators, definitely interesting to see Epic push harder into mobile.

UE 5.5 Preview is out now, with the Release version coming in November and UE 5.6 in Late Spring 2025.

Game Dev

How much is a Steam Daily Deal worth?

One of the holy grails of the Steam algorithm is being granted a chance to get on a Daily Deal, this puts your game on the front page of Steam for one day with a deep discount. Millions of people see this but just how many buy it?

The developer behind Final Profit has made a post sharing the stats. TLDR: 1200 sales and $10,000 revenue in a single day.

By the time they were invited the game had been out for 18 months and made around $80,000 in gross revenue with 20,000 outstanding wishlists.

I've previously mentioned some excellent research done by Chris Zukowski (watch my marketing videos with him) on this topic and one surprising thing is how this game does not seem to be close to those results. From his research in order to be eligible you needed >$150,000 and 2000+ reviews.

But they have since increased the Daily Deal amount from 2 to 4 and have automated the process, so perhaps this means there is now a better chance for more devs to get access to a daily deal. That's a great thing since more devs get more opportunity but naturally it means the impact of each daily deal is also lessened.

So if your game has grossed around $80,000 and you haven't yet been invited to a Daily deal then perhaps contact Steam support to see if you can get it. Even though the effect is smaller nowadays it is still definitely worth it.

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Game Dev

Find massive SUCCESS with 3 TIPS

The game Soulstone Survivors is one of the biggest hits of the past few years. It took the Vampire Survivors formula and made it in 3D with an ton of content and excellent polish. With almost 20 thousand reviews at 90% positive this is a huge hit, likely grossed over $6 MILLION.

And the game is still in Early Access with constant updates that are very well received, this will likely be an even bigger hit when it reaches 1.0

There is an excellent writeup on the Synty blog about this game. They built a prototype very quickly and experimented with what made the game fun. They tested early and often, constantly getting feedback from actual players to find what worked.

This game is an excellent example of three things. First is taking something popular and building upon it, this is a great strategy to find success with reduced risk. Remember how players like something familiar with just a slight twist, if you make your game too unique it ends up being a very hard sell. You should definitely NOT do a direct clone, but start from something that works and build upon it. Check out my videos with Steam Marketing Expert Chris Zukowski for more on what makes a good game idea and how unique is too unique.

Secondly, they kept the scope small and focused. This was the first game by this studio, all the developers had experience but this was their first game together. Keeping the scope small and focused allowed them to really hone in on what made the game fun to play.

And thirdly, using assets to speed up the game dev process. This is one very important aspect about this hyper successful game, if you're a game dev then you likely recognized the Synty assets right away.

One question that I see constantly is "will players hate my game if I use assets?" and I've made an entire video on that topic where the answer is No players do not care about assets, they just want to play fun games. So use all the tools and assets at your disposal to make awesome games.

Speaking of that there is an excellent Synty bundle out right now, you can get thousands of assets that enable you to build any game you can imagine for 98% OFF, get it here!

Oh and they're also having a sale on their own store with a discount on their latest packs.

Tech

Build Origamis with AR

AR has yet to take over the world but slowly there are more and more interesting use cases shown.

Here is a great one showing an overlay teaching you how to make a paper airplane. It overlays instructions directly in the world, it's all correctly positioned and skewed to match the paper on the table. It's animated and the instructions are pretty easy to follow.

This could definitely be expanded to be turned into a platform that contains a database of origami tutorials, kind of like how Tabletop Simulator works.

Previously there was also someone making a fun mini-game for cleaning your room, another one for learning piano, and of course there are lots of AR industrial overlays for teaching people to operate all kinds of machines.

I'm definitely a big believer that AR will continue slowly growing over time. Not so much in gaming but in all these other use cases where adding something virtual on top of the real world can be really useful.