Game Dev

Escape from Duckov's rise to 2 million players

It's rare to have games find success outside of Steam. You have only a handful of examples like Minecraft, League of Legends, Genshin Impact, etc. Then others found massive success during an early release and only went onto Steam after they were super polished, like Factorio and Prison Architect. One of the biggest that is still not on Steam is Escape from Tarkov, it has been selling millions of copies since 2017 just on their own website. (By the way this is actually a game made with Unity! A lot of people don’t know that because they still think Unity cannot produce AAA-level visuals, but this game shows it can be done)

However there are some devs that only buy games on Steam and if it's not on Steam then it doesn't exist for them. This is actually a nice strategy that can be a great opportunity for indie devs.

One developer did just that with the recently released Escape from Duckov. The name is obviously a clear reference and the gameplay is also similar in various ways while also being unique and having its own identity. Partly due to the similarity to that massively successfuly game, and partly due to the fact that this one is genuinely good, it is selling like crazy with 2 million copies sold in just 2 weeks!

It is a top down game with lots of guns and attachments, a huge world, lots of loot, although it is PvE instead of Escape from Tarkov's PvP. The game is also insanely well polished, this is one of those games that it can be worth it to get it just to study how well polished it is. The movement feels satisfying, the line of sight looks great, the shooting looks, sounds, and feels great.

And of course the game doesn't take itself too seriously, the ducks give some levity to what is usually a very hardcode genre, and I think that's also part of the reason this game is finding success, a lot of people want to play Escape from Tarkov but don't want to deal with the super hardcode difficulty of losing everything when you die.

The team spoke to Game Developer a bit about the development of the game, how it started as a 4 man team and grew from there.

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Game Dev

Unity 20th Anniversary Game Jam!

Unity is turning 20 this year! It's crazy to think how it started in 2005 after they made a game called GooBall and it flopped, in doing so they realised that the game engine was actually more valuable than the game they made.

To celebrate this milestone they are having an Anniversary Game Jam! It is running next weekend for 48 hours with the theme being announced on November 7th, 2025 at 5pm UTC.

Also as part of this celebration they have updated a bunch of assets from the past 20 years to Unity 6 that you can download, so if you've been using Unity for a long time you might recognize some.

You can join either solo or in a team, they have their official Discord if you want to find someone.

Tech

Home Robot finally available! (not really)

Robotics has been getting a massive boost these past few years. It wasn't that long ago that Boston Dynamics was making their first bipedal robots, and now there are loads of those, all of them can walk fine and do all kinds of tasks.

Now the next step is to finally make them useful and available for regular people, it seems that moment is finally here with NEO that you can order today!

Except not really... You can pay today but deliveries start in 2026. And more importantly is how the video seems super cool with a very capable robot doing all kinds of tasks, but in reality there is another video that more clearly shows what is actually real and the reality is all those complex tasks are currently teleoperated. Meaning someone in a VR headset is controlling the robot, it is not controlling itself. The goal is to use AI to make it autonomous, but it needs data to learn so for now it’s all just human operated.

Meaning we still have a ways to go until we reach the stage where we have a commercially available humanoid robot that is capable of doing all kinds of tasks humans can do autonomously.

But still in terms of tech this is impressive! The robot has very good dexterity, it is using a pulley system for the fingers like some other robots that give it extremely precise control. And like I mentioned in the beginning it appears regular walking is now basically a solved problem. The visual is also interesting, it is wearing a knitted sweater which does make it look more friendly.

Perhaps by the time it actually launches in 2026 it will be somewhat capable.

Fun

3D Modelling with your fingers!

Blender is a very complex program that requires lots of hotkeys to use effectively, but what if you just used your hands? It turns out that's actually possible!

Some artists have built really impressive models on their phone using nothing but their fingers.

It starts from a cube and ends up with a proper low poly face. It's even textured! Impressive stuff!