Game Dev

FREE Multiplayer ebook and Explainer Video!

Unity has published YET ANOTHER awesome FREE e-book, this time on Multiplayer and Networking!

They've been publishing and updating these like crazy. There was the Programming Patterns one, the VFX Graph one, then one on Optimization and now this one on Multiplayer.

Alongside the e-book they published a great video. It's an excellent high level overview of networking in general and how to use Netcode for Game Objects.

The e-book is 92 pages long, covering everything from basic networking concepts (what is a server? UDP vs TCP?), also what is a Server Tick, Client-Server vs Dedicated-Server, what is Distributed authority, all the layers that make up the networking stack and tons more.

Remember how Unity has lots of Multiplayer tools, I covered a nice high level overview in this video.

For Netcode, you have Netcode for Game Objects (1hr video, 6hr course) or I have also just recently I published my MASSIVE Netcode for Entities Tutorial. This took quite a while to research but I'm really happy with how it came out, it's basically the tutorial I wish existed when I started my research.

Netcode for Entities is a bit more complex, it's based on DOTS, it's super performant so it's what you want to use if you're making super fast paced multiplayer games (like a competitive shooter) whereas Netcode for Game Objects is excellent for more small scale co-op titles.

Affiliate

Excellent Unity MEGA Bundle with the 24 best Assets launched in 2024 for $24!

Since these were all launched in 2024 you likely don’t have any of them yet (I didn’t!)

Includes an awesome Synty Animation Pack, Volumetric Lighting tool, Flying System, Locomotion Animations, Stylized Customizable Characters, Terraforming 2D Terrain, some awesome Image Effects to polish your game and more!

As usual with these bundles, the discount is super deep at 97% OFF so if just one looks interesting then the whole thing is worth it.

Check the page HERE and get the bundle, only live for 3 more days!

The Publisher of the Week this time is ZectorLab, publisher with lots of very spooky horror characters.

Get the FREE Bull Tank character, really nice stylized Bull/Minotaur, great Enemy for your game or maybe your main character.

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

Tech

Lots of Tech News! (Quantum, XR, AI)

This week has been pretty crazy in terms of Tech news.

First Google has unveiled Willow, their state of the art Quantum computer that is a major step in Quantum computing. It was able to compute in 5 minutes one task that would take classic computers 10 septillion years to compute! It has 105 Qubits (that's an insane amount!) and apparently they've improved error correction substantially.

It's fascinating to see Quantum improve year by year, I wonder what things will be like in 10 years. Massive encryption problems? Who knows...

In other Tech news, Android XR! This is Googles Extended Reality Operating System. They are partnering with Samsung to make headsets and glasses that can overlay something on top of the real world. You can talk to it with voice and it uses AI to understand and reply back, you can watch YouTube in virtual reality, open Chrome and do the usual things in these devices.

Unity has partnered with Google to provide experimental platform support for Android XR, if you're interested check out this blog post.

They have also announced Gemini 2.0, their latest AI agent model. It has a bunch of interesting improvements but best of all is how this model can look at a game image and browse the web to identify what is going on.

In the demo, one person asks the AI to remind them of the Daily Quests, another asks how to best build an army in Clash of Clans, and another one the player asks the AI for what is the best character for the current meta.

I imagine this would be potentially quite useful as a tester while you're developing your game. Ask it to pay attention to some things like difficulty or resource amounts as you're playtesting your game and maybe draw some graphs, could be quite useful!

Then OpenAI has also been publishing lots of news all throughout December, the big news is Sora (their Video generation model) is now available. Results are still super impressive, people have been generating a lot of awesome stuff, both realistic things, abstract videos and even cartoony styles.

Gaming

The Game Awards!

This week was The Game Awards!

It was the 10th edition (the first one had a trailer for GTAV!), as usual it was a great event celebrating the best releases of this year while also containing tons of new game announcements.

The big winner of the night was Astro Bot, winning both Game Of the Year as well as 3 other awards. Balatro was another great one picking up 3 awards, insane result for a solo developed game!

GTAVI obviously won Most Anticipated, Best Multiplayer went to Helldivers 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 got Best Community Support.

In terms of announcements, lots of awesome stuff, one key theme for the night was old franchises coming back from the dead. Okami is back, as is Onimusha, Turok, Virtua Fighter and Double Dragon.

Witcher 4 got a super cool new trailer, Mafia: The Old Country is looking great, Split Fiction looks like another great couch co-op experience.

Indies were also present, One Move Away is a cozy first person packing game, Stage Fright (Overcooked devs) looks like a fun co-op adventure, Thick as Thieves (Warren Spector) looks like an interesting concept, and Kyora looks like a modern Terraria.

I'm also right now editing the video that I will publish tomorrow where I analyze how many Steam wishlists all of these games got by being on the show, stay tuned!